


For Every Exception

by FanaticismForWords



Series: The Exception Series [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, Light Angst, Original Character(s), Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Protective Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2020-10-19 10:43:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 33,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20655923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FanaticismForWords/pseuds/FanaticismForWords
Summary: Here’s the thing about war. It slowly picks your soul apart until there is nothing left of it. You may go home safe and sound with both arms and all ten toes. Your sight may be safe and your ears may not stop ringing. It's only after you wake up drenched in sweat at twelve a.m in the morning and flinch violently when your three-year-old daughter tackles you into a hug that you realize that you’ve lost.Here’s the thing about war. It slowly picks your soul apart until there is nothing left of it.Here’s the thing about war; You always lose.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: This is the third installment of a series that isn't really different from canon with the exception of my main character, her powers, and some relationships. It might be in your best interest to read the first two stories before starting this one, but if you're not interested then, by all means, have a nice reading :)

** _you’ve got your toothbrush next to mine and on the vanity lies your comb  
you’re sleeping in my bed and nothing feels more like home _ **

“Stark on your right.”

The buildings were portentous enough for Steve to call Tony for back up, knowing that the engineer was tinkering in his lab and would have appreciated taking the day off to blow up Hydra bases.

“Widow, what’s your stat?”

There’s some grunting coming from the other end, but Steve knows better than to assume that Natasha is in any trouble, he’s seen her handle far worse than a couple of soldiers that had expected for today to be another lazy Saturday; they were severely unprepared and lacked proper weapons to go against the top-notch ones Stark made.

Steve doubts any weapon could ever top the one Tony makes, doubts any mind could top Tony’s.

The three of them work fluently together, six years of fighting side by side engraved into their bones. Tony catches him without caution when he jumps off buildings and lands himself safely before dodging appropriately when his shield bounces around the Hydra agents as Natasha meets up with them on the roof.

“All agents cuffed and out of the building.” The spy tells them, despite Tony scanning for heat signatures to make sure.

When he nods in approval, Steve and Natasha scale down the building and moments later, the large building located in the middle of nowhere bursts into flames, taking away Hydra’s labs, computers and files.

The red and gold armour descends gracefully, the repulsors a familiar sound, “That was fun.”

Natasha puts her guns back into their holsters, “You and I have very different definitions of fun.”

The faceplate lifts to reveal Tony’s playful smile, “Playing darts with Clint and a knife?”

“You bet.”

The ride home is eventful and fun; everything is eventful and fun so long as he is with the Avengers. They talk about making a visit to Clint’s for dinner, they hadn’t done that in a long time and the conversation briefly hits a sour note when Natasha brings up Bruce but apart from that, he’s smiling as he’s making his way up to his floor.

He sees her, sleeping on his couch and thinks that Tony was right when the engineer told Steve that he’s a different kind of happy when he’s around Liz.

He pads slowly towards the furnished living room, and bends his knees so that he’s at level with Liz.

She’s had a particularly long day at the hospital with meetings and surgeries and a problem with the bloodstock. She’s been gone for over thirty hours and the occasional check-up with FRIDAY, who reassured him that she was fine and not passed out somewhere was the only thing that kept him sane.

It seems that she walked home and just fell on the couch. She’s on her stomach, her hair falling off the couch, strands of gold and chestnut playing with the air. Her legs are thrown around haphazardly and her arms are in an awkward position, which definitely cannot be comfortable.

He plays with the loose strands of hair falling over her face, gently moving up to her face and tracing the freckles near her ear until she slowly opens her eyes and her lips tip up in a sleepy smile.

He doesn’t feel guilt over waking her up, not when he knows she’ll fall right back to sleep when he carries her into his bed; their bed.

She doesn’t say a word as he picks her up bridal style into their room, just burrows herself into his chest and lets out a small sigh of content as he deposits her onto the bed.

He strips out of his uniform and surveys the room, spotting all the _Liz_ intricately blended into his room; the second nightstand holding her tablet and the picture of her and Tony, her coat thrown over his chair, the blue lamp that emits light the exact shade of the arc reactor for when she wakes dreaming of losing her brother, the spare room that’s now her closet and the walls that she filled with framed photos of him and her and them and their family, old and new.

Steve didn't realize he could like home so much.

The clock reads eight in the morning and, despite it being the time where he would usually go for a jog with Sam, he texts his friend, apologizing for not showing up in advanced before placing the phone on his nightstand and getting under the covers.

Liz’s eyes flutter open when she feels his presence and she smiles dopily, “How’d it go?”

“Good.”

She juts her chin out in a sleepy gesture he’s familiar with and he closes the distance between the two of them, pulling her closer by the shirt that’s about five sizes too big for her because it's his. When they pull apart, she tucks her head under his chin, fitting there like a missing puzzle piece and he wraps an arm around her protectively, momentarily plagued with images of Bucky falling off a train and Bucky turning into Liz.

He wakes up three hours later to a series of expletives coming from his kitchen and he follows the burning sound and doesn’t bother trampling down the fondness bursting in his chest.

Liz, still wearing his shirt that is five sizes too big but only reaches her upper thighs, stares forlornly at the attempted pancake that looks more like a black hole than food and even though he’d be more than happy to stare at her like this for the rest of his life, his kitchen is moments away from burning and so he has to clear his throat.

She looks at him despairingly, “I don't get it. I'm one of the smartest people in America, how the hell can I not make a pancake?”

He tries not to laugh and fails spectacularly and she pushes his chest lightly when he comes close, though pulling him back in and pouting in a manner that should be illegal, “Don’t laugh. Show me what I'm doing wrong.”

He dumps the beyond burnt pancake into the trash and takes the bowl of batter that he made a day ago from her hands, pouring the mix into the pan, “First of all, you’re cooking it at too high of a heat.”

She furrows her brows, “But that way it’ll cook faster.”

He pulls her towards him, pressing her back to his front and eliciting a smile, “No, you’ll burn it.”

He trails kisses across her neck and she arches herself to give him more access, laughing when the light stubble on his chin tickles her skin, “I think I’ll just stay away from the cooking. I have you for that anyway.”

“Always knew you were using me for my cooking.”

She spins around in his arms and smiles up at him, a little drowsy and eyes slightly hooded and he tries to remember the last time he was this happy, “You also kiss pretty good.”

The pancakes nearly burn because they’re making out in the kitchen; she’s sitting on the counter and he’s in between her legs and they only stop when he smells the beginning of a burn and she complains but hops off the counter and gets two sets of plates and cutleries, cutting up strawberries for him and pulling out the maple syrup and chocolate chips for her.

In between mouthfuls of pancake, she asks him, “What are we doing today?”

Steve shrugs making a mental catalogue of everything he doesn’t have to do today, “How long do you have?”

“It's my day off. I’m yours the whole day.”

He slides his stool forward, wiping off syrup from the corner of her mouth, “Is that so.”

Presuming from the slight darkening of her eyes, she can trail his thoughts but then she makes a face that is so inexplicably Elizabeth Stark and asks him, “But can we go out today? Eat lunch out or something; I feel like all I've been doing is work, home, work, home and it's driving me nuts.”

She could have asked him to fly up to the sun and bottle some of it up for her and he’d have done it. She’s in his kitchen that’s now their kitchen and she’s wearing his shirt with bed head and she’s still got syrup in the corner of her mouth and she’s looking up at him and he honestly thinks she can’t get more beautiful than this but he knows she’ll prove him wrong someday.

“Ya, Whatever you want, hon.”

She beams up at him and he has to repress the words bubbling up his throat for no reason at all.

_I love you. _

He hasn’t told her because he wants it to be perfect and, call him a sap, he wants it to be romantic and memorable. The words threaten to bubble out of his mouth every five seconds and he wants to shout it out from the rooftops sometimes; that he’s irreversibly in love with Elizabeth Stark but, considering that the rest of the Avengers also live in the tower, he assumes that he wouldn’t hear the end of it after that.

They go to the park where they first met, the park where she first saw him. She’s reading something Charlotte Bronte, her head on his lap and her hair a halo in the grass and she thinks he’s drawing the ponds in the swan but he’s just drawing her. She’s got a yellow flowy dress on and her feet are bare and the arc reactor necklace hangs off her neck as it always does and she’s reading her book and occasionally looking up to smile at him; it’s impossible to find something better to draw.

_His drawer is nearly filled to the brim with drawings of Elizabeth Stark. Sam had found it and told him that he’d be calling the police if he didn't know better. _

They eat lunch at the little Italian place down the street, with enough of a homey vibe to make both of them feel at ease despite the stares and Liz is comfortable enough to steal his meatballs and theatrically shove them into her mouth.

They’re taking an aimless walk down the street when Liz tugs on his hands, looking at the sign stuck to the grass at a nearby cafe, “I didn't know they brought the exhibition here.”

The sign reads _Captain America; A War Hero Story _and has a large arrow pointed towards the other side of the street to a building where a steady mass of people walk into.

She tugs him and he follows, and they pay their dues and walk into the quiet exhibition filled with kids and adults alike.

He doesn’t realize that he’s forgotten until he sees the picture of him and Buck standing side by side in one of the pictures - his arm thrown around the friend that’s alive somewhere,- surrounded by Howard Stark and the Howling Commandos. The weight of the secret crushes him like a boulder when he remembers, when he realizes how deranged it is that Liz makes him forget about the lie he knows about her family.

“I know him.” She points at the man at the far end, three men down from him and he puts a name to the face instantly.

“Jim Morita?”

She shrugs, “Ya, sure. Met him once or twice at one of dad’s parties I used to sneak into. Stopped seeing him after realizing dad’s parties sucked.”

She gets a laugh out of him afterwards but then he resumes silently staring at the photo of the men that stood by him when he was nothing but an inexperienced rookie subjected to a freak experiment. 

“Do you miss it?”

She’s referring to the picture and she’s obvious in her hesitation to breach the subject. She’s always had an inkling of fear that if he was given the opportunity to go back and change things, he’d take it and it wasn’t until today that she, in few words, voiced her concerns to him.

And Steve looks at her, her eyes hold no malice or accusations, giving him the entitlement to miss it, because he does. He misses the Bucky Barnes that was his best friend and the men that he had laughed with during the war. He misses Peggy and he missed Howard and he misses Brooklyn.

He answers truthfully, “I’d give it all up again if it means that I get to have you.”

He’s gripping her hand like it's a lifeline because he needs her to see how much he means it. He misses Peggy and he misses Howard and the Commandos but he wouldn’t trade Elizabeth Stark for anything.

He doesn’t realize that soon, he’s not going to have a choice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note to Self: Finish this goddamn series before the end of the year.  
Note to Self: I'm never going to finish this series.


	2. Chapter 2

**maybe i’m not good at discerning right from wrong; maybe i’m making a mistake  
but even if there’s a chance i'm right, then that’s a chance i have to take **

She’s adopted a habit of calling it her lightning streaks. They, in some way, do resemble the shocks of lightning that would occasionally grace the sky prior to a storm.

The first time Elizabeth Stark saw them, she had just blown up a country, had watched it vaporize into the air, and was falling to what she had presumed was her definite death. Before the wrapping of cold metal around her arms, she had seen the thin streaks of colour that travelled through her flesh like electricity; had seen the colours glow around her, had been shaken to consciousness and had thought it was simply a hallucination.

The second time, she had twisted her foot in the middle of the ocean and had momentarily panicked and the colours that lit up the water did not help to ease her slight hysteria but by the time she had resurfaced, choking on salt and gasping for oxygen, the cracks in her skin that were colour was gone, and she knew better than to shrug it off.

She came to a conclusion, a conclusion supported by enough instances, that the streaks only appear when she loses control. She starts to panic or loses her grip on the lid that reins in her anger and fear and they're exposed through tangible colours over her skin.

She wonders where the colours come from. She’s used to seeing lightning spark from her fingers and fire dance through her eyes but now there’s reds and greens and purples and yellows and she doesn’t know what to make of the new addition. She knows better than to fear the foreign entity coursing through her veins; she’s had nearly three decades of doing that and it's given her nothing but pain and lies and she’ll never take that path again.

These things should not be in the forefront of her mind as she’s trying to get a word in during her conversation with the council, the members waving a thick document over their heads with misguided looks of knowing and she shares a look with her brother, who she’d already had this conversation with when they began hearing whispers of the Sokovia Accords coming into play.

She breathes in through her nose and lets it go slowly; her glowing rainbow isn’t going to help the situation and she tunes back to the ending of Councilwoman Patel’s long-winded speech about the Avengers and wrecking havoc and chaos.

Tony looks at her, and she nods in return, “Okay.”

The word shocks the members into stunned silence, not having heard the word ‘okay’ ever come out of a Stark’s mouth ever during any conversation between the two of them.

“Excuse me?”

Liz suppresses her smugness at having the upper hand, “We said okay. Obviously, we’re not down with everything the Accords outlines but we’re signing it.”

She gives the Council a moment to look at each other; they had obviously planned for a fight of some kind and she is sure that both Tony’s and her compliance has thrown a shift in their carefully constructed plans and raised suspicions.

In the end, there is nothing left for them to talk about. Councilman Gao sends her a tight smile and turns the video call off, the holographic figures disappearing from the room, bathing the floor within the four walls in darkness.

Later, as she and Tony go through the schematics for BARF one last time, he asks her if she thinks they’re doing the right thing.

“We can’t just destroy countries and walk away. Just because we wear masks doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have to answer to the same laws that everyone else does. How are we any better then?”

Tony rubs his temples, feeling an oncoming headache, “This isn’t going to sit well with some of them.”

Liz tries for a smile, “You mean it's not going to sit well with Steve.”

“Hey, I'm trying to be nice about it.”

She throws him the headpiece, “Don’t bother; my boyfriend has a penchant for getting on the government's bad books. Who knew Captain America was so bad at following rules?”

“If Cap doesn’t agree then Sam doesn’t either,” Tony points out.

“Much like you and Rhodey. We need to stop looking at this from sides and start looking at it as a team.”

Tony’s face constricts into something familiar, something she used to see when she would come home with an award or a degree only for her father to dismiss it casually, something pitiful and sympathetic and she hates it, “This is going to put a real hurdle on the whole team thing, you know. The Accords basically states that it's either we stay Avengers and abide by those rules or we don't abide by the rules and stop being Avengers.”

“I don't think it's that simple.”

She’s right; it isn’t. She knows that the title of an Avenger means nothing to any of them if it's going to get in the way of them saving people. However cherished the name, Liz knows that if any one of them had to choose between Avenger and hero, they’d always choose hero. Hero is, unfortunately, etched into their bones; she doesn’t think any of them can stop without an incentive bigger than aliens and flying countries and government documents.

It’s complicated because she knows that she and Tony are going to make amendments. It's complicated because she and Tony are signing not because they’re okay with the Accords, not because they’re okay with being put in handcuffs but because they need to be on the UN’s side to change the document, make it less restrictive, make it fair for both parties.

It becomes complicated, even more so, when Wanda accidentally sends a bomb into a building in Nigeria. She’s in Turkey when it happens, busy with overseeing a joint project between her hospital and another one and only opens her phone and sees the _128 missed calls _and _348 unread messages _at two in the morning.

She takes the next flight back home and walks in time to see Ross throw the Accords on the table. Her eyes find her brother, whose slumped tiredly in the back of the room and she feels herself going into a panic, and she has to clench her fists in an attempt to subdue her lightning streaks as she clashes eyes with Tony.

_They were supposed to have more time. _

Ross notices her arrival and gives her a curt nod, and she sends him a cold look in return, “Judging by the last conversation we had with the council, the Accords were still underdeveloped.”

The Secretary of State meets her stare head-on, absolutely not fazed since he, for once, has the upper hand, “Things happen. Circumstances moved it up. Doesn’t change anything.”

He’s wrong; the Accords coming into play now changes everything. She and Tony were supposed to have a year to negotiate the Act and make amendments. They were supposed to have a year to transfer power, a year to prevent a war, a year to fix things.

Now, they have a little more than twenty-four hours.

“You knew?”

Steve’s gaze is accusatory and Liz wasn’t expecting this to be the way she spoke to her boyfriend after not seeing him for nearly a week.

Tony gets up from his spot on the couch, “The Accords were in the talks ever since Sokovia. We destroyed a country you know. There had to be ramifications.”

Steve is adamantly resolute in his opinion of the Accords. Liz knows it has much to do with the fact that HYDRA had infiltrated the government before; the fact that the previous Secretary of State was Hydra. Tony’s pleading his case, fostered by the encounter of the mother of a child that had died in Sokovia, fostered by his ever-present guilt complex. Vision is making calculative points and Sam is putting in his own two cents.

She tries not to let the fact that, only a few days ago, they were discussing battle tactics instead of arguing about a legal document bother her.

Soon enough they’re looking at her and she senses the impending storm, wills her control to save her, “I think we should sign it.”

She can’t bear to see Steve’s look of disappointment, “Liz-”

“Hear me out, okay. We can’t avenge the world if its leaders are out for our heads. They won’t let us into active battlefields until we sign. We can’t save people if we’re running away from the authorities. What kind of heroes are we if the world is afraid of us?”

Steve doesn’t contemplate her words, “We’re not doing it for recognition or praise.”

Some part of her knows that they shouldn’t be having this conversation in front of the whole team. Some part of her knows that this conversation has somehow extended to beyond the relationship of the team.

“I'm not saying we’re doing it for recognition or praise. I'm saying that Rhodey is right. We can’t make enemies with the United Nations. We can’t have people afraid of us. We can’t just march wherever we want to whenever. That’s not how this works.” She tries to explain, tries to get him to see her side of things.

Tries to get him to remember the state she was in after Sokovia. After she came back with her bones failing her and her will shaky because she had to operate on the very people she had a hand in injuring.

Steve’s animosity for the government and past traumas of giving up control prevent him from remembering, “You know what they’ll do to us. Know what they’ll do to Pietro and Wanda. You know what they’ll do to you-”

They would have noticed the streaks of colour cutting through her arm if it weren’t for the fact that their mind is preoccupied with trying to make the right choice. She doesn’t notice the slight heat in her arm because she’s raising her voice,

“I know what they’ll do to me. I have a higher risk count than all of you combined. I blew apart Sokovia, remember? Signing this is like putting the repressor back on. Do you think I don't know that?”

Steve gets up from his seat, ignoring everyone else’s discomfort at being privy to a conversation they probably shouldn’t be present for, “Then why-”

Liz, who caught sight of the colours on her arms, remembers to breathe and calm herself down, “Because the UN is not someone we want on the opposite side. Because if we agree, then there’s room to make adjustments. We can amend things; negotiate. We have the best legal team on our side. The trackers and risk counts and restriction could only be temporary if we play our game right.”

Natasha looks at her, backing her up, “One hand on the steering wheel.”

“One hand on the steering wheel.”

Steve is silent. There’s nothing on his face that lets her know if he’s even considering signing. Liz looks at the rest of them in the room and they understand her silent implore as they, one by one, leave the room to Steve and her.

She takes a seat beside him, “Steve.”

She doesn’t want to push him but she’s aware of the time restrictions, she’s aware of the pressure.

He looks at her, his face a perfect match of her own, imploring to consider his side of things, “I've been blindly following the government my whole life.”

Her hands rest on top of his and, in a familiar gesture, he rubs his thumb along her wrist, “I'm not asking you to blindly follow our government,” she says, “I'm asking you to blindly follow me.”

His face goes soft for the first time since she’s seen him, morphing into a look she knows is reserved purely for her and she wants to hold him close and tell him how much she loves him.

“I’d blindly follow you anywhere, you know that. But the Accords ties my hands in a way that I promised I would never let anything do. I've been a good soldier for over 70 years, Liz, only to figure out it was all a lie.”

She knows it's moot pushing the matter further. She knows that pushing too hard would only end up in the deterioration of one of the most important relationship in her life.

So she doesn’t push.

“Fine,” she lays her head on his shoulder feeling his lips press into her hair, “we won’t talk about this. I haven’t seen you in almost a week. I missed your face.”

He manoeuvres her by the waist so that she’s lying on top of him on the couch in the communal area. She’s forgotten that he’d come out of a mission, a disastrous one but a mission nevertheless, only yesterday. She grips his shirt tightly biting her lip to hold back her words when he kisses her forehead.

_I love you _

Instead, she tugs on his shirt, prompting him to open his eyes, “Promise me you’ll think about it though.”

She’s expecting an argument but she doesn’t get one, he simply looks at her the way he’s always looked at her and nods.

She falls asleep shortly afterwards. When she wakes up, Steve’s gone and all she’s left with is a curt message informing her about Jim Morita’s death and his participation in the funeral. She wishes he would have woken her up so that she could have accompanied him but Sam’s text telling her to not worry because he’s with her boyfriend gives her a fraction of peace.

And as she’s going through the highly detailed document, far too detailed for her to believe the Council when they told her a few days ago that the Accords were a work in progress, she drops the stack of papers and stares at her hands, the lines on her palms, the print on her fingers.

She wonders about the streaks of colour that travel through her skin as if the flesh makes a pathway to accommodate it.

She’s adopted a habit of calling it her lightning streaks.

She wonders what they really are.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not entirely sure I get the Sokovia Accords. I'm not sure what role they play post Civil War. But I'm trying my best and if anyone wants to explain it to me, feel free to do so.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm obviously writing this more slowly than I thought I would and I'm obviously not going to pick up the pace because I'm that productive so...
> 
> Happy Reading everyone :)

**i’ve got reassurances that i’m right and allies brand new   
they don’t mean a thing, not when i don't have you **

The knock on her door interrupts the dilemma lying on her bed and she opens the door to see Natasha and Pietro, dressed occasionally in a dress and suit respectively.

Liz schools her shocked expression a minute too late and Pietro rubs the back of his neck, somehow looking sheepish and smug at the same time.

“I think I'm going to sign.”

She knows that she can believe in the Accords’ potential all she wants but everyone that signs have to be a hundred percent sure that they’re okay with subjecting themselves to the terms outlined in the document, at least until she and Tony find some way out of its restrictive measures.

She raises an eyebrow at the seventeen-year-old speedster, “Think?”

He relents, “I'm going to sign it.”

She ushers both him and Natasha in, “Even though your sister isn’t.”

“Would you have still signed it if Tony didn't?”

She’s thought about it. Slightly feared the idea that her brother wouldn’t submit to the Accords’ controlling demands. It took a day of fretting but by the end of it, she decided that it didn't matter what her brother stood for, not as long as she believed in the Accords bringing about the kind of peace that makes people feel safe and the potential of revamping the Accords so that it doesn’t backfire on her years into the future.

She tells Pietro the condensed version of that.

He smiles at her, the boyish exuberance still intact even though there’s the ever-present worry that’s been there since they first met, “I think I can live with trusting you Starks to fix it.”

She knows that Pietro has been hanging in the communal lab with Tony the past few months, helping him with the cars and being encouraged to enrol into school, a simple mechanics course that will prepare him for a job at SI that Tony had offered. The two of them had mended whatever grievances Pietro had against Tony in the past and Liz felt good to see Tony working with someone after Bruce disappeared without a trace.

“Are you planning on a trip?” Natasha stares at the several articles of clothing that she had dug up from her closet and brought to the room that is part hers, part Steve’s.

She groans when she remembers the situation prior to the knock on the door and falls on the bed, looking up at one of her best friends.

“Help me. I don't know what to wear.”

The Russian spy looks funnily at her, “And you think to ask me?”

“You seem to be doing alright in that department.” She gestures at the elegant but suitable dress Natasha is wearing. She may be lethal on the battlefield, but Natasha has always had a knack for style and somehow always managed to dress appropriately for any given situation.

Liz, on the other hand, did not care for much beyond jeans and t-shirts and the occasional business attire. She had to fish out the very few dresses she didn't know she owned and throw them on the bed before trying to decide what screams ‘Signing Legal Document that Labels Me As A Global Threat’.

Natasha rolls her eyes and shuffles through the dresses on her bed, before tugging out the green one that Liz has fallen over. It’s more blazer than dress and Liz puts it on in the bathroom; tugging the sleeves up to her elbows and carefully arranging the tangle of chains that was Steve’s dog tags and the arc reactor necklace Tony gave her years ago.

When she walks out, Pietro is gone and Natasha waits with a comb and a curler. The assassin had a penchant for many things and Liz had learned that hair was one of them. Natasha had once told her that doing things like cooking, dancing and doing hair made her feel less assassin and more human so Liz simply sits and lets her friend twirl her hair around the curling wand, before pulling the sides of her hair back and clipping them in place.

“Are you sure? About signing.”

The redhead looks up from where she plays with the necklaces on Liz’s vanity, “Ya. I’d rather not make enemies and I rather keep us all together.”

Liz plays with the tiny arc reactor around her neck before nodding, accepting Nat’s answer and walking out with her to the plane that would take them to Vienna for the signing.

Natasha stops before getting in and takes a step back, looking at Liz with a hesitant expression that’s lined with something that resembles sympathy and pity and Liz knows what, more precisely who, the conversation will take a turn towards.

“I’m going to go to Steve first. See if he changed his mind.”

Liz would have done that herself if it were that simple. If Steve Rogers wasn’t the most stubborn, immovable person she’s ever met. Liz would have followed him to London if she were brave enough to entertain the possibility that Steve would blindly follow her into the hell that was the Sokovian Accords.

_“You keep smiling at me like that and I’ll meet the devil for you.” _

She keeps herself from feeling the little tug in her heart that’s a little more painful than she’s used to and tries to smile for Natasha. She drops the act when she remembers that Natasha Romanoff was the woman that held her up when her brother was dying and made her feel a little whole again. Drops the act when she remembers that no mask is going to fool her.

So she just nods and walks further into the plane, spotting Rhodey and Pietro arguing over a magazine, knowing Tony will be fashionably late as always.

“Tasha,” the spy must detect something in her voice, perhaps that shrivel of fear and the slight vulnerability because she pins Liz with a soothing gaze, tethering her in place and letting the words fall out,

“If he doesn’t want to sign, don't-don’t push him. I’d rather him not sign that regret it in the future.”

_I’d rather him not sign than regret me in the future. _

The ride to Vienna is quiet, filled with missing people and uncertainty. There’s a dark cloud hanging over their heads, reminding them of the consequences if they don't play their cards right, if they screw this up. Liz believes with every ounce of faith in her body that it would do the world good if they got this right.

She pretends that she isn’t desperately waiting for a text from Nat; a text telling her that she and Steve are on their way, a text telling her that everything is going to be okay because Steve will be with her the entire time.

They walk into the large building in Austria, passing by people in suits and dresses that Liz remembers seeing on TV or working with indirectly.

A woman by the name of Paige directs the lot of them to the room filled with microphones and chairs and bustling with people. She leaves them be and Tony, in a manner so characteristically Tony, makes his way to the Council Members present, presumably to rile them up. Rhodes does his own share of networking, shaking hands with the people and trying to uphold a pleasant conversation.

Liz hates it. Hates the way they’re all smiling at them, pretending like they’re not cornering them into signing a restrictive document that takes away some of their freedoms; like they’re not shoving them into a cage and forcing them to lock themselves.

“We should take a seat,” Pietro whispers in her ear, and leads her towards the desk with her name on a white placeholder. Pietro takes the seat beside her, even though it's designated for Tony and she smiles at him gratefully.

She’s tried not to panic reading her criteria for when she signs the Accords. Tried to breathe through the knowledge that they’ll try and control what she had slowly learned to accept, slowly learning to love. She had tried to come to terms with the idea that they’ll try and control a part of what makes her who she is.

She had failed enormously.

Pietro’s hands grip onto hers and she takes away her attention from the wooden tables to the teenager, who tilts his head to indicate the arrival of Natasha.

_Hope is dangerous,_ she decides when the redhead scans the room until her eyes burn into her own and her stomach plummets violently and she feels a burning sensation in her eyes when all Natasha gives her is apologies and sympathy and no Steve. She expected for the soldier to hold his ground, expected nothing less but she held a tiny inkling of hope, a little crumb of a wish that he’d walk in and make everything a little more bearable than it is.

With the hope gone, the room becomes too bright; there are too many conversations, too many noises and the walls start to close in on her. She thinks she said something like excuse me to Pietro and stuttered out an _‘I’m fine’ _to Natasha but the next thing she knows is that she’s bent over outside of the large building, one hand holding onto the wall for support while the other grips onto her agitated stomach trying not to cry.

“It’s necessary.”

The accented voice comes from behind her and she spins on her heels, tugging down the blazer dress and looking at T’Challa, Prince of Wakanda.

He introduces himself regardless, and she feels herself growing a little cold when she meets his calculating gaze, as if he’s identifying a threat but returns the introductions regardless.

“Wakanda is happy to help even with the very little-”

She cuts him off, “I know about your secret tech country, my father was friends with yours.” All the Avengers know about Wakanda, especially since the country was listed as a potential threat back when SHIELD was alive and kicking.

He nods knowingly, shrugging his shoulders and she wills him to go away, wills him to leave her alone so that she doesn’t walk into the conference with streaks of colours pulsing through her arm.

“I know you think it isn’t ideal, but the Accords are important.”

She remembers the words on the pieces of paper that were given to her, made for her. Remembers reading things like _high risk _and _unstable _and _should be restricted _and feeling like a ten-year-old again, feeling scared and hating the energy coursing through her veins. Feeling like the nineteen-year-old that willingly shoved a torture device into her neck in hopes of feeling like less of a human bomb.

She cuts the future king of Wakanda with a bitter look, sadness evident but impossible to conceal.

“You know I put a device in me that sent electric jolts through my system for ten years. It hurt like a bitch but I kept putting it in because I hated the lightning.” She bites her lip and blinks rapidly because somehow, there’s water in her eyes and she’ll be damned if it falls, “and then there were aliens coming out of a hole in the sky and I’m taking the repressor off and finally starting to learn to accept the lightning, accept myself. Then I get this document and they’re calling my risk factor and putting a repressor back into my system and telling me that I need to be controlled so do me a favour and spare the importance speech.”

She’s met with silence and she knows it's stupid of her to expect anything after she dumped two decades worth of issues onto a complete stranger and she walks away to leave and re-enter the International Centre.

“Do you know why Wakanda is participating in this?”

She looks at T’Challa, he’s smiling slightly, raising his version of an olive branch and she looks at him hesitantly, opting to listen because her words fail her.

“Have you ever heard of the Black Panther?”

She remembers the fables her dad used to tell her when she would have a nightmare and Tony was off at college, “Ya, sure. It's a myth. Ancestral passing with some potion that basically made you Captain America.”

T’Challa looks at her with disbelief, “You shoot lighting from your fingers and fought alongside a Norse God and you’re telling me you think the Black Panther is a myth?”

She feels the heating of her cheeks before the pieces fit, “Are you telling me that you’re the Black Panther?”

He nods, “Wakanda joins the Accords not just because our vibranium was used in the Ultron fiasco but because we have to prepare the UN for when Wakanda is exposed to the rest of the world.”

It's an olive branch, she’ll realize much later. He’s giving her an olive branch and she grabs onto it; she’s been fighting this war for so long and she’s tired. She wants, she needs, more people backing her corner, she needs people to look at her and tell her that she isn’t screwing everything up by doing this, that she isn’t crazy for thinking that this will work.

They walk into the Vienna International Centre as she asks, “I thought that Wakanda was to remain a dirty little secret. You plan on changing things once you become King?”

T’Challa shrugs, and they both keep a well enough distance and remain stoic, aware of the several cameras trained on them, “Maybe not for a long time. But one day, it will be impossible to hide. The Accords, in a way, protects us.”

“It might also perish you.”

He turns around just as they’re entering the large conference room and looks at her with a look that’s pure knowing and slightly smug, “Not if you succeed in doing what you plan to do.”

She doesn’t want to wonder how he knows that she and Tony are planning on making amendments; how he knows that they’re just signing so that they can infiltrate from the inside, “Does that mean you’re on my side?”

He smiles this time, it's small but genuine and she believes she made a new friend, “If your side involves fewer shackles and more justice than I suppose I am.”

He’s waved over by some man she doesn’t recognize and she makes her way to her designated seat, Tony looking at her with worried eyes as she smoothes the green dress and sits down. She tucks her hand into his and squeezes tightly, silently telling him that she’ll be fine.

She doesn’t tell him that she wants Steve.

She listens to the speeches and itches for his hand that’s her lifeline.

She flips through the document, waiting and never hearing him telling her to breathe.

The bomb goes off and she’s sent flying through the air, her lightning streaks jumping out of her skin to make contact with the air to create a cocoon of power that saves herself and Tony and she waits in vain for Steve to shout her name.

She’s okay. She’s alive and she can feel the blood remain inside her body. She’s staring at the ceiling when she’s really staring past the sky, to the man; to the _‘he’ _that wants her dead,

“Not today, huh?”

She’s got the UN on her side and made friends with a Prince of a super-secret country and she’s about to infiltrate one of the most important documents in the world but she’s on her back looking at the ceiling and the falling pillars with an ache in her bones and tears in her eyes.

She just wants Steve.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been so long since I've had the motivation to touch another written work. Hope this turns out well!

**i think i love you too much to risk watching you walk away  
so i lie like a coward and hope you love me enough to stay **

“I'm sorry for not telling you.”

Steve looks at Sharon Carter intently. Blonde hair and brown eyes and nothing that really resembles Peggy Carter physically. But Sharon Carter runs into danger headfirst, stands up for what she believes is right and refuses to let anyone belittle herself and Steve thinks that it makes sense for her to be Peggy’s niece.

Doesn’t make being lied to any better.

“Not telling me that you weren’t actually a nurse or that you were Peggy’s niece.”

His tone is teasing, trying to indicate no harsh feelings and Sharon smiles gratefully before shrugging, “I couldn’t have told one without telling the other.”

“I guess.”

Steve puts his hands in his pocket. Conversation was never easy between the two of them. Back when he believed that she was just his nurse neighbour, their talks were laced with the awkwardness of a man who was never good at talking to women in general. Now, without the lies and deception, Steve’s trying to keep in touch with Peggy’s niece as if it would do him any favours in trying to remember the woman that he lost over seventy years ago.

As if it will distract him from the mind-numbing fear of losing the woman he loves to a government document.

“You knew him?” Steve angles his head towards the photo of Morita.

Sharon studies him for a moment, finding something that causes her to usher them both onto the couch in the lobby of the hotel, facing the TV, the last thing Steve wants to look at. Every news outlet is doing a story of the proceedings in Vienna, and a small crowd is gathered around each TV screen placed in the room, discussing and gossiping on what they think of the Accords.

_Plant yourself like a tree _

Sharon Carter is perceptive enough to ignore the Accords in its entirety and instead talks about Jim Morita, “Aunt Peggy was close with the Commandos. They had dinner every month and she would bring me. That’s when I met the Starks actually. Howard brought Tony and Elizabeth to one of those dinners.”

He doesn’t remember Liz ever mentioning Sharon. In her defence, he never mentioned Sharon either, “You were close with Tony and Liz?”

“Not as much as you are. Howard stopped coming to the dinner and by extension so did Tony and Liz. We lost touch, but it was fun while it lasted.”

He doesn’t know if he should feel guilty looking at her. It's obvious that Sharon loves her aunt, loved her aunt, and Steve wonders how much she knows of her death; wonders what Daniel Souza had told their family to protect Liz.

Sharon Carter’s perceptiveness, he realizes, is all Peggy Carter, from the way she tilts her head slightly to the right and the way she smiles knowingly, finding amusement at having the upper hand, “I know, about the lightning bolt.”

Steve doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t know where this conversation is going and he’s prepared to listen.

He’s also prepared to walk away if Sharon’s going to put the complete fault on Liz.

“Uncle Daniel called us all in after Ultron and explained how she really died.”

“It wasn't her fault.” They both know who the ‘_her’ _is in reference to.

Sharon shakes her head, “Yes it was.”

Steve tenses in his seat, ready for an argument, ready to defend the girl that Sharon Carter doesn’t really know, the girl that very few really know.

Sharon holds her hands up in a placating gesture, “Relax Steve, I’m not going to hunt her down and put a bullet in her, I don't think I’d succeed even if I wanted to.”

“It was Liz’s fault, but only to a minimum. It was Howard Stark’s fault. It was Daniel Souza and Peggy Carter’s fault as well. Liz should have never taken the repressor off, especially when she was angry but if the adults in her life had just taught her to love her powers instead of fear them, then the lightning bolt would have never hit Peggy, Liz would have never lost control.”

His eyes face the TV screen now, reading the headlines about the various people in attendance at the Vienna International Centre, he tries to scan for someone familiar, anyone familiar and fails, “Seems to me that you don't blame Liz at all.”

Sharon also turns to the TV screen, “I don't. She didn't call the lightning and she didn't want to hit Peggy. Her parents had died and she was mourning but her powers were her responsibility and in the end, it hurt no one more than it hurt her. We can’t blame her because we’re too busy feeling sorry for her having to shoulder all that responsibility on her own.”

“She had Tony,” Steve tells Sharon.

He remembers Liz telling him one night that at one point in her life, Tony was the only thing standing between her and a grave. Remembers her telling him that Tony was the only thread holding her together.

Sharon shrugs, “We could have helped as well.”

The hotel lobby erupts in chaos at the same time the bomb goes off in the Vienna International Centre. There’s a deafening roar in his ear as the residents bustle in anguish and his body doesn’t cooperate with his head because he’s stuck, _frozen, _looking at the building that he knows houses the most important person in his life burn into flames.

“-eve”

_Liz _

“Steve”

_Liz _

Sam shakes him out of his obliviousness and he looks to his right to see Sharon gone. Sam pulls him up and for a moment, just for a moment, his legs give out under him because Liz was in the building and there was a bomb in the building and he’s lost so much and he can’t lose her.

_God, please. Not her. _

“Steve,” Sam shouts in his ear, and he blinks away the red and focuses on his friend, who he knows is trying to stay calm even though the absolute panic in his eyes betrays him.

Sam tries again, “Captain,” as if the moniker is going to change the fact that Liz and Natasha and Tony and Pietro are all in that building and he’s supposed to take care of them, his team, he’s supposed to take care of _her_, keep her safe and he failed.

_“Let go. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I’m going to keep you safe.” _

He failed. He should have been there.

“Get the jet ready,” his voice doesn’t even sound like his own and he clears it to regain a semblance of control, “We’re going to Vienna.”

He tries calling Tony first. Pepper Potts’ voice responds with a curt greeting and requests to leave a message after the beep. Natasha’s doesn’t even send him to voicemail and he’s forced to click on the picture of Liz, sitting crossed-legged on their bed with an Iron Man t-shirt and hugging his shield and the line rings once, then twice.

_“Hey, you’ve reached Elizabeth Stark,” _her voice painfully tugs something apart in his chest, and he closes his eyes and holds himself together, “_I’m obviously not able to answer the phone right but I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. If I don't, then don't bother calling back. Chances are that I'm ignoring you. Hope you have a great day.”_

“We’re almost there man,” Sam tells him from his seat in the Quinjet, the pilot manoeuvring the aircraft expertly despite his panicked state.

He stares at Steve from the mirror, Steve whose looks like he’s getting progressively worse as the minutes go by, like a ticking bomb that’s going to erupt any second if Elizabeth Stark doesn’t show up alive and unharmed.

“She’ll be fine Cap. She’s survived a lot worse than a measly bomb.”

They both know that there was nothing measly about the bomb that blew up the International Centre. They were there when they saw the impact of the weapon, far greater than any bomb that Sam has ever witnessed.

But they have to believe that Elizabeth, Elizabeth who got struck by lightning, Elizabeth who blew up a country, Elizabeth who had missiles fired at her, found some way to not only protect herself but the people around her, their people, from the explosion.

They land in a desolate place in Austria and by the time they reach the International Centre, the red tape around the building and the extensive amount of cops and bomb squads and bodyguards puts a hindrance in their plans to storm the place and demand for their team.

“Steve,” The soldier turns around so hard that he gets a whiplash that should hurt but doesn’t and he scans for any injuries on Natasha who clarifies, “I was out to go for a bathroom break. Bomb didn't hit me too hard.”

Steve looks behind Natasha as if Liz would somehow magically appear out of thin air and when he sees nothing he looks at the spy, “Liz?”

Natasha, instead of giving him the relief he’s desperate for, pulls him into a corner, away from the press and officials, “You shouldn’t be here.”

Steve grits his teeth, holding onto the thin string of patience he barely has, “I don't give a damn about what I'm supposed to do. Where’s Liz?”

“I'm here.”

His heart beats correctly when he sees her. There’s a small scratch on her arm and her hair and dress are a mess but she’s there and she’s alive and Steve makes a choked sort of sound before making fast strides to get to her. He stops halfway, scanning for the injuries up close and when she smiles amusedly at him, blue meeting blue, he pulls her close.

“Scared?” Her voice is muffled into his shirt and he tries to pull her impossibly closer.

“Only a little. 98 percent.”

She pulls away, her eyes crinkling at the corner and he cups her face as if she were made of the most precious glass and kisses her gently, once and then twice, taking her in after thinking that he’d lost her for three hours.

“Everyone else?” Sam asks and Steve has the decency to be ashamed for forgetting about him and Natasha.

“Pietro ran before the bomb could hit, Natasha was nearly out the door to begin with, and Tony’s arguing with Pepper right now. We’re all fine.”

He turns around to look at Sam, catches his eye while he’s engrossed in a conversation with Natasha, and smiles his thanks. He doesn’t know what he would have done if it were not for the man dragging him onto the jet and brining him to Vienna.

“Steve,” Liz tugs on his arm and pulls him further in the alcove a distance away from the building.

She doesn’t make eye contact, biting her lip hard enough for it to turn red and Steve pulls it from under her teeth, “What?”

“The bomb,” She looks apologetic and hesitant, “they think it was Barnes.”

His world collapses for the second time that day, “What? How? How do they know?”

“There’s video evidence. The profile of the bomber matches with your friend. Tony’s trying to figure things out but...”

Perhaps his streak of protectiveness isn’t exactly healthy. Perhaps his habit of running into battle with nothing but adrenaline and impulse might not work in his favour one day. But even as he works out the problem presented to him, he’s already making a mental trip to where he knows Bucky is, thanks to the system Tony put in place to help, “Why are you telling me?”

“Because I didn't like the way you looked at me when you figured I already knew about the Accords and didn't tell you.” She answers truthfully, continuing before he can protest and make her feel better, “and you were right. I shouldn’t have hidden that from you. I shouldn’t be hiding anything from you. So I'm telling you now. They think they’ve found the bomber and they think its Barnes.”

The nitpick of guilt that is slowly eating him away from the inside rages on; sometimes he wishes Liz were just a little less perfect than she is, wishes that she harbours a secret that’s big enough to destroy lives, break relationships. Sometimes he wishes he loved her a little less so that he wasn’t so scared of the possibility of losing her.

Sometimes he wishes he were a little braver, to tell the truth even if it meant losing her.

_For all that he can sacrifice, for all that he has sacrificed, he shouldn’t be surprised that he draws a line at Elizabeth Stark. _

She starts to make a little more sense when he pushes away the guilt and focuses on Bucky, “they’re going to get him.”

“And I need you to tell me that you’ll stay out of their way.”

Something that feels a little like frustration riles up inside of him, “He didn't do it.”

Liz grips both his hands, holding it tightly to anchor him to the ground, “I know. But it doesn’t make him look any less guilty if you take him and run. Don’t blow this up before you give us, me, before you give me a chance to fix it.”

_Trust me. _

She talks about guilt and fixing and chances but Steve knows that she’s asking him to trust her. And he does. He trusts her with the Avengers, he trusts her judgment on the Accords, he trusts her with his life.

Not with Bucky.

She’s not going to protect Bucky the way he will. In the end, no one is going to be able to separate Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier and Steve has one shot to protect the only person he’s ever had and he knows it means that he won’t trust Liz but protecting Bucky has been engraved into his system for far longer than Elizabeth Stark has been in the picture.

Someone calls her name, laced with urgency and she pulls away, hesitating. She looks at him and implores and he feels something cut deep and creates a wound.

“Stay, please.”

It's as if someone else nods for him, as if someone has their hand on his skull, forcing him to move his head up and down and smile back as she grins at him, with hope and love before she’s gone and so is he.

He becomes Bucky’s Steve and amazes at how easy it is; being the Steve that fought alongside James Buchanan Barnes. There’s a distinct part of him that yells _Liz _and he doesn’t ignore it. He knows there’s apologizes to come. He knows that he’s going to grovel at her feet, apologize for the mess he’s caused, sign the Accords.

For now, he protects Bucky.

`~*~`

There used to be a time in her life when she would scope the news regularly; a time between sixteen to nineteen when she would imprint newsreels in her head, remember the names and faces of victims that died a death she had thought she could have prevented.

Male, 34 years old, dad of one, brutally murdered near 56 Keeper’s Street, near the house the Jarvises had her over for sleepovers in.

Female, 16, aspiring pianist who volunteered at the local animal shelter stabbed to death three blocks away from her college.

Elizabeth stopped doing that once she put the repressor in primarily because it would give her another reason to take the Infinity Dampener off and also because the mental chart did nothing but help her hate herself further.

Today, she, unconsciously and without realizing, adds another face, another name to her list of regrets; her list of failures.

T’Chaka, 64, King of Wakanda, father of two, killed by a bomb at the Vienna International Centre, a few feet away from where she was.

So when she walks up to T’Challa, staring brokenly at the sight of his father being carried away, white cloth covering his face, she truly means it when she tells him that she’s sorry.

“It was not your doing. It was Barnes’ doing.”

There’s something in his voice. Something she can identify with, something that chills her bones, just a little, just enough for her to be cautious.

“The authorities have that handled.”

He snaps his head to her, clearly not appreciating her cautionary tone and she wants to apologize over and over again.

_I’m sorry I couldn’t save him. I'm sorry I wasn't enough. _

“The authorities aren’t enough.”

She takes a step back, his predatory glare and offensive stance betraying his thirst for revenge, his search for retribution, “Enough for what, T’Challa?”

He doesn’t give her the satisfaction of hearing him say the words out loud; she had hoped that saying the words might have allowed him to take a step back, might have allowed him to reevaluate his decision, rethink the things that he stands for.

“Who lives and who dies isn’t your call, T’Challa.”

He doesn’t even try and disguise the anger when he takes a step towards her, doesn’t even try and hide the raw grief searing him from the inside, “He killed my father.”

And this hits too close for comfort for Elizabeth Stark. Parent dead, child angry, child gets reckless, child murders, child never comes back. This whole mess is a repeat of her own and she’d be damned if she’s going to watch someone else make the same mistakes she did.

“And killing Barnes is not going to bring him back.”

He nods, but bitterly, slow and calculating, not an ounce of feeling, “Yes. But it will make me feel better.”

She’s nearly begging now, close to getting on her knees and asking him to save her the pain of watching someone else go through what she did, “It really won’t. Trust me on this one.”

“I don't trust you.”

It's only hours later that she figures out that T’Challa wasn’t the only one who didn't trust her.

At least the King of Wakanda had the guts to say it to her face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's chapter 4; next one coming up in another three years, stay tuned everyone!  
I'll (hopefully, hopefully) be on a better writing schedule for this point on and won't make you wait for the next chapter for a month. 
> 
> Also, I decided to go ahead and make myself a tumblr (and holy shit, that place is crazy) so you can find me at https://www.tumblr.com/blog/fanficfanatic


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm obviously not going to remember to update until someone reminds me to in the comments. Sorry for the late chapter. Happy Reading :)

**you shout and yell and curse and seethe   
but i’m a ticking bomb so please, just let me breathe **

She makes a pit stop at the compound before she goes to Berlin. There’s too much on her mind and she’s putting too much effort to keep breathing so Liz goes to the Avengers compound before she goes to Berlin because she doesn’t know if she can face Tony and Ross and Barnes and Steve and her broken heart just yet.

Wanda’s there, because Wanda’s locked in there, and she’s forgotten until it's too late and she’s walking into the kitchen where Wanda stares outside the window forlornly and then at her accusingly.

“Look, I know it's not ideal,” She can hear the exhaustion in her own tone and Wanda, kind but broken Wanda, furrows her brows and forgets about the lockup.

“Are you okay?”

She tries to say yes but there’s a block in her throat where there should be words so she nods but it's weak and she just wants to collapse. Wanda smiles at her reassuringly, as if she knows, as if she understands. But Wanda’s locked up in the compound, and even though this isn’t bad as far as lockups go, this is probably amazing as far as lockups go, she feels guilty.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she heaves in a breath because she sounds too weak, “we were supposed to fix this before this even happened but then Ross came in with the Accords and it didn't make sense because _we were supposed to have more time _and everything isn’t right and I don't know what to do-”

“Hey,” Wanda grips onto her shoulders and practically shoves her into one of the kitchen stools.

“Your Elizabeth Stark, you’re going to fix this.”

She shakes her head, even though that if the circumstances were different, better, she might have hugged Wanda at her belief in her, “I don't think I can fix this.”

By ‘this’ she doesn’t mean the Accords, she means the mess with Steve and Bucky, the mess with T’Challa, the mess with her powers. Wanda doesn’t know this, obviously.

So perhaps Elizabeth Stark’s first mistake was not clarifying that she had the Accords under control. Perhaps her first mistake was letting Wanda believe that Liz and Tony didn't, in fact, have the answer to the problem that landed Wanda in a prison; a beautiful prison, but a prison nevertheless.

Wanda knows that right now, Elizabeth Stark is not in a position to give answers, throw out reassurances, plan solutions. The woman looks half-dead, too weary and a part of her wants to tell her to stay behind and let Tony and the others handle the mess in Berlin.

The other part knows that Elizabeth Stark is the only string that’s holding this whole thing together and Wanda’s selfish enough to tell her to wash her face and change her clothes and get on the plane because she’s going to be fine.

Wanda doesn’t believe it. Liz doesn’t either. But the doctor does exactly what Wanda says and emotionlessly, as if she were a robot, makes her way into the floor that she and her brother had once shared and tries to look a little less dead and a little more her when she arrives in Berlin.

She can’t bear to enter the floor that she shares with Steve. She’ll break down otherwise and she doesn’t know what they are or why they’re here but she knows that if she breaks the lightning streaks that whizz through her skin and dance over her flesh will no longer be her secret anymore.

She doesn’t even know how she gets there, but somehow, she’s walking through the halls of the Terrorist Centre building; fuchsia tank top tucked into black jeans and heeled boots her preferred armour for the day. The arc reactor necklace rests over her breastbone, the chain hidden over the high neck of her top but reminding her that she, despite the lightning streaks and one breath away from a breakdown, is still Tony Stark’s little sister, is still loved; is still human.

Sometimes, it's the little things that keep her going.

She catches her reflection in the mirror and mentally thanks Charlotte McCoy for taking one look at her face on the video chat and sending in her people to do her hair in waves and paint over the dark circles under her eye and fill in the hollows on her cheeks.

“Ms. Stark,” Everett Ross introduces himself, but Liz looks in shock at Sharon Carter standing beside her. The girl gives her a smile and she returns it; Sharon Carter was a small fragment of Liz’s life but an appreciated fragment, a fragment that she couldn’t revisit after Peggy Carter.

“Glad to see you still alive.” She sounds and talks just the same and Liz doesn’t know how that’s possible since the last time she talked to her, they were around ten years old and barely understood the complexity of the world.

“Glad to see you still kicking ass.”

Ross looks between the two of them, “I'm sorry, do you two know each other?”

“We’re cousins,” Liz cringes at the poor description, “Sort of. Family friends maybe?”

When Ross looks at her suspiciously, Sharon raises her hands defensively, “We haven’t talked to each other in years. I'm not going to spill.”

The Task Force Commander sends Sharon away shortly after and gestures Liz to follow him, “We have your friends with us. Got themselves into a mess, Ms. Stark.”

She doesn’t know what to say anymore. She hopes Ross doesn’t figure out that she’s treading waters without purpose, that she has no idea what to do moving forward.

“Barnes?” She asks, remembering his panicked eyes as he fell from a Helicarrier all those years ago.

“Lockup,” Ross replies curtly, closing the topic fast enough for her to understand that there is something pertaining to Barnes that he doesn’t want her to know.

“Then I guess that’s where we’re going first.”

She neutralizes her face through the suspicion directed at her; she straightens her spine, shoves at her anxiety, and reminds herself to breathe. She counts back from five hundred and keeps her focus on the long winding halls and the flickering lights as Ross leads her towards the room where they locked up the Winter Soldier.

_Four hundred eighty-two _

_Four hundred eighty-one _

And perhaps Elizabeth Stark cares too much for a world that didn't care. Perhaps she cared too much for people she barely knew, for things that no one else cared about.

But there’s anger when she spots James Buchanan Barnes locked in a cage with restraints too strong for a person, and measures too inhumane for her liking. There’s the kind of fear in his eyes that she recognizes all too well and it takes her a moment to see past the red.

“Jesus, what is he, an animal?”

“Ms. Stark,” Ross begins to protest, but she cuts him off.

“Take that muzzle off for God’s sake. What is he going to do, breathe fire?”

Ross and the guards in the room have the decency to look slightly ashamed and they walk towards the man and open the glass cage pulling out electric sticks and Liz remembers the repressor sending shocks through her system and she marches up to the men and Barnes in long strides.

“Move.”

“Ms. Stark,” Ross has his hands on his gun and she doesn’t know if he’s going to shoot her or if he’s going to shoot Barnes but she isn’t going to stand here and figure out.

“Don’t you think the electric batons are a little extra, maybe? Poor guys got his hands and feet tied so tight I worry about his circulation.”

Barnes is looking at her blankly but she doesn’t recognize the murder that was there when they fought in the Helicarrier so she knows enough to assume that what Steve said about him being in his own state of mind again was true. She tries to give him a smile, tries to wordlessly reassure him but she knows that it falls flat, especially since she doesn’t know how she’s going to fix this, how to help him.

_Four hundred twenty-four _

_Four hundred twenty-three_

The best she can do right now is take the muzzle off his face even when Ross warns her, “He’s dangerous.”

“I’m a human stun baton; I think I can handle myself just fine.”

Secretly, paying careful attention to the many guards that surround her, the guards that back up a bit after her previous statement, she loosens his restraints, just a fraction of a bit, not enough for him to escape suppose he was to use his super strength but enough for his blood to flow a little more freely and for the pain to ease just a little.

She murmurs softly as she carefully loosens the restraints, quietly enough so that no one but Barnes and his enhanced hearing can hear, “I’m going to go on a whim and guess that you’re still Barnes. I don't know how to help you, but Steve’s here and so is Tony and between the three of us, I'm sure we can think of something. I don't know how it works or if you can control it but I really need you to not Winter Soldier on me until we get ourselves out of this mess. I’m Elizabeth Stark by the way.”

His expression doesn’t change when she steps back and the glass closes but there’s a hint of confusion, perfectly called for, and something else that she cannot identify, something like guilt, but before she can figure the man in front of her out, she’s ushered out of the room.

“You don't think he did it.” Ross’ tone is accusatory, and Liz forces herself to stay calm.

“He was miles away from Austria when you found him. Supersoldier or not, that doesn’t add up. Besides, the evidence is purely circumstantial, I just want to cover all the bases.”

“His face was on camera.”

“Exactly. This was the man that never got caught since the Second World War. You’re telling me that he just looked into a camera?”

Her observations have unsettled Ross but she knows he isn’t going to give her the satisfaction of admitting that this really doesn’t make sense, “People get sloppy.”

“Not these kinds of people. Besides, bomb isn’t really the Winter Soldier’s MO. From what I’ve heard, he’s more of a kill one person with a gun kind of guy.”

The room they, Tony, Steve, T’Challa, Sam and Natasha, are in is made of glass, she spots them sitting at the table with varying angry expressions, sulking like children and she, for the life of her, doesn’t want to go in. She wants to run away from all this and never return.

She’s used to not getting what she wants.

_Three hundred sixty-nine_

_Three hundred sixty-eight_

All eyes cut to her when she walks inside the room but she’s too injured, too cracked to look at the expression on Steve’s face, doesn’t want to know what she’ll see in it, doesn’t know what she’ll do if there’s no trust.

So she looks at T’Challa, narrows her eyes and tilts her head, “Black Panther, huh?”

He has the decency to look slightly ashamed, even though there’s a hardness in the corner of his eyes that signifies his thirst for vengeance, “I told you it wasn't a myth.”

She, ungracefully, drops onto the chair nearest to the entrance and feels the hammer pounding in her head palpably, “I didn't think you actually meant running around the place dressed up like a cat. I mean, are the ears really necessary?”

When she receives no response, she looks up from where she dropped her head onto the table and stares back at the concerned gaze of her brother, “Lizzie, your deflecting.”

“Gee, thanks for telling me. Wouldn’t have figured it out otherwise.”

The door opens to another person and Liz wants to cry.

It was not the ideal time for Thaddeus Ross to show up; no time was ideal for Thaddeus Ross to show up. The man had a particular hate for the Avengers, a special hate for the Starks, and he, in no way, ever made any situation better by showing up.

“Is this what you meant by handling it, Ms. Stark?” He accuses, points fingers, throws her own words back at her.

Elizabeth Stark tries to straighten her spine, tries to quell the churning in her stomach, and tries to remind herself to breathe.

_Two hundred forty-six _

_Two hundred forty-five _

_Two hundred forty-four _

The arc reactor is cold against her breastbone and provides her with little to none of the comfort it usually does. Instead, it feels like a weight and she, despite swearing to herself to never do so, wants to yank it out because it's too heavy and she cannot breathe.

Ross’ voice is curt and angry cuts through her haze, but doesn’t make it better, “Ms. Stark.”

“Don’t Ms. Stark her,” Tony, the voice belongs to Tony, “it’s not her fault any of this happened.”

_Two hundred thirty-five _

_Two hundred thirty-four _

“She said that she would get a handle on it. She told me that she would handle Rogers.”

“What do you mean handle me, Liz?” _Steve, that’s Steve. _She sees the colours on the tips of her fingers, obscured by the large table and she doesn’t know how many breaths she has left to breathe.

_Two hundred twenty-two _

_Two hundred twenty-one _

Natasha’s voice is barely identifiable and she wonders why no one is saving her because she’s drowning, “Liz, you have to keep us updated on these kinds of things.”

“No, she’s supposed to keep _me_ updated on these kinds of things.”

“Lizzie, what do you want us to do?”

_Two hundred and one _

_Two hundred_

_Two hundred _

“Liz,”

“Liz “

“Lizzie,”

_Two hundred _

_Two hundred _

“Elizabeth you have to-”

The girl who stands up so harshly her chair falls to the floor. The girl who bangs her hand on the conference table. The girl with streaks of coloured lightning coursing through her entire figure, dancing through her eyes. The girl who screams, “Can I breathe?”, who gasps for air and claws for sanity.

That girl isn’t her.

There’s fear in the room and she faintly sees Ross trying to call for backup and Tony glaring at him and then turning to face her, nothing but concern and worry in his eyes and she’s glad that she doesn’t see fear because that would have broken her for good.

Her brother takes one step towards her but she scurries back, her hands still pulsing with colours and her head still stuck underwater.

“Lizzie,” he calls her name softly, slowly like he’s talking to an injured animal but her defensive stance keeps him far away from her, far away from her potential to hurt him.

“I'm—I’m,” she gulps for air and it's harsh and loud and the last thing she expected was to have a panic attack in the middle of everything, “I’m going to get some air.”

She’s out the door and into the streets of Berlin within a second. The colours on her arm have subdued but they’re still there, even though they’re faint.

She looks up at the sky, at the ‘_he’ _that wants her dead, the ‘he’ that may or may not exist, and asks him,

“Is this you?”

_‘He’ is too busy coaxing six entities out of their caves. He is too busy, planning and prioritizing to notice that the girl with lightning in her veins and fire in her lungs who was supposed to be easy to kill, is slowly becoming harder to destroy. _


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not dead, just exceptionally terrible at keeping up with my updates.

**i asked you if you promise; it was an implore, a plea  
you thought you broke your promise, instead, you broke me **

If Steve Rogers were given the choice to hate only one thing, he’d choose silence. He’d choose to hate silence over hating the cold, hating Loki, hating the Red Skull, hating HYDRA, hating the Accords.

He’d choose to hate silence because silence was the sound he heard for seventy years in the ice. Silence was what preceded the ringing in his ears after he lost Bucky to what he had then thought was a train. Silence was the only thing he heard the first week he was awoken in the twenty-first century, holed up in an empty apartment with nothing but silence, his old enemy, to keep him company.

Silence was his only friend, his nightmare, his burden until he walked out the door one day and heard Elizabeth Stark and her infectious laugh and sharp heels and kind voice. After that, the silence was gone; replaced with the busy noises of New York, with the whirring of the Iron Man suit, the roaring of the Hulk, the sounds of the familial chaos that were the Avengers.

Silence was everything until Elizabeth Stark barged into his life and made it worth absolutely nothing.

Silence was absent in the early mornings when Liz would open the windows and let Manhattan drown in. Silence was fought away when she would pace around their floor, arguing with board members and laughing with friends. Silence was forgotten when she’d play music in her lab and he’d sketch the crinkles in her eyes and her tongue peeking out of her lips as she poured her entire concentration into her holograms. Even when she was gone, she took the silence with her, DUM-E rolling around the place and knocking things over, Tony barging up to steal things from his sister’s lab, Jarvis reminding him of all the things he promised his girlfriend he’d do.

With Elizabeth Stark, silence was nothing but white noise, simply forgotten, thrown away.

The room is bathed in silence after she flees out the door, and Steve simultaneously itches for a pencil to draw the little cracks in her skin that shone with colour, the matching shades in her eyes and wants to claw at his skin for not noticing the broken way she held herself until she shattered entirely.

“FRIDAY,” Tony’s voice shocks him out of his stupor and banishes the silence and Natasha’s pulling him back before he can follow Liz out the door.

“Panic Attack, Boss.” The mechanical voice responds and when Tony’s eyes widen, Steve knows he didn't mean to expose his sister in front of a room full of people that shouldn’t hear.

“No, no, I got that. How about those colours? How long has she had them for?” Tony asks, waving Ross out the room.

Steve knows that the answer is going to break him. He knows that Liz was not shocked enough for this to be the first time the coloured streaks appeared to course through her skin. He knows that this, along with the fact that she’s been battling her own demons, has been one of the many things he’s ignored about his girlfriend.

“Since Sokovia.”

Sokovia. That was nearly a year ago. He wonders how she had managed to hide something so obvious for a year. He wonders if it was that easy. Wonders if no one had been paying enough attention.

Tony looks at him and there’s nothing accusatory in his gaze. Steve had always known, ever since he had schemed to get Liz on the back of his bike, that the man did not mind him dating his sister; Steve doesn’t know what he would have done if that had changed. Tony looks at him and they share regrets. They should have paid more attention to her, they should have seen her breaking. They shouldn’t have let her break alone.

Tony Stark knows, just by seeing the unfamiliarity between Liz and the attack, that today was the first day she’s experienced anything of the sort. He had expected the repercussions of not just Sokovia, but taking the repressor off and dealing with her powers to hit Liz mentally as well as emotionally, he just wonders if the colours over her skin have something to do with her PTSD, or if it's another matter altogether.

“Excuse me,” he absently tells the others in the room before he’s jogging down the stairs and out the building where he can see his sister sitting on a bench.

He approaches carefully, as to not startle her, and seats himself beside her.

The wind creates occasional ripples in the lake in front of them. The water, bright and blue, contrasts greatly with the sky, contrasts greatly with their lives. Sporadically, a duck or a swan will stream through the lake, calling out to the others before flying off until they’re nothing but specks in the sky. There’s a sense of peace in this lake, despite it being located directly in front of a building that represents everything wrong with the world, the lake makes Tony want to forget for a moment and breathe.

“It was the first time, you know.” His sister’s voice is raspy and weary, barely loud enough to hear.

Tony keeps his eyes trained on the blue, “I figured.”

“Kind of expected you to ask about the lightning streaks.”

He raises a brow at the name, “Lightning streaks. Is that what they are now?”

His tone is perfectly neutral, purposely so, in order to hide his expression away from his sister. She doesn’t need coddling, she’s too strong for that, but she doesn’t need for him to be the emotional mess.

“I don't know what they are. I just call them that.”

“I wish you’d told me.”

_I would have made it better _

She turns around and he does the same, blue clashing with brown. Sometimes, he forgets how much he misses his mother until he looks at his sister’s eyes, almost a matching replica of Maria Stark’s, sans the various streaks of different shades of blue that Tony suspects are the outcome of her powers.

“I wasn't trying to—I wasn’t ever _not _going to tell you—I just,”

He watches her try and piece the words together in her head and he gives her space to do so, maintaining his neutrality on the subject despite his sister’s well-known penchant of figuring him out, “What?”

“These powers-my powers- they were never really mine, you know? I’d always had to share them with dad, with the repressor, with Aunt Peggy—with you. For once, it was as if I had them all to myself, without the scans and science. I don't know, I thought maybe if I could think of it as my own, I’d love it more. It's stupid I know-”

He cuts her off before she can undermine herself, “No, no. Not stupid. They _are _your powers, Lizzie. They don't belong to anyone but you. I just want to know if they’re dangerous.”

“Not dangerous. I did tests; they’re, again, like an extension of me. Doesn’t show up in any of the results.”

He’s guessed that much but it relieves him to get it confirmed. He’s only ever wanted for her to be safe and healthy; learning to accept her powers is just an added bonus.

“Well, then I guess-”

The alarms, loud and disturbingly shrill, scare away the ducks and swans and Tony and Liz turn in time to see the faint red flashing through the windows, indicating an emergency. Less than a moment later, a herd of people are running out the building, in a chaotically confused manner, and he and Liz are up from their seats and running into the Terrorist Centre.

“I’m going to take a wild guess and say this is Barnes. Where’s your suit?”

Tony slows his strides, walking behind Liz, “She’s right here.”

His suit of armour means nothing next to his sister.

They get thrown on their asses, one by one. He knows his limits, especially without the armour and seeks refuge behind a wall watching with suppressed fear as Barnes throws Natasha, one of the most tactical fighters he’s ever had the pleasure of meeting, as if she were nothing but a rag doll.

Liz fares a little better, only because of her powers, but her attention is split between Barnes and Tony, so when Barnes escapes, his sister frantically looks for him instead of running after the Winter Soldier.

“I’m fine,” he calls out, waiting for her attention before pointing in the direction Barnes ran off to, “Go get him.” 

Adrenaline is Elizabeth Stark’s best friend as she runs relentlessly up the stairs. Much like Steve, Barnes accumulated muscle weight creates echoes of footsteps along the metal staircase and she keeps her focus towards her feet, taking a leap off the ledge and grinning in satisfaction when the water, that somehow doesn’t wet her, swirls through her legs and carries her up and in front of Barnes.

The last time they fought, also the first time they fought, she had the element of surprise. She could bet that Barnes had never seen a person flying on a wave of water before and she had used his shock to her advantage when pulling her punches.

This time, the soldier is mentally prepared to see the elements dripping through her fingers and throws the first punch, the metal arm sending her toppling back a few steps, groaning at the joint force of supersoldier and vibranium.

“Seriously, come on man, that’s not fair. You can’t have both.”

She anticipates the next attack, easily manoeuvring against it, materializing electric ropes that wrap themselves around the silver arm she would pay a ridiculous amount of money to tinker with; Tony would double the price. It’s what she tells Barnes in between blocking his punches and throwing her own.

He’s been fighting for longer than she’s been alive, even longer than Steve’s been fighting for. She’s nearly his equal with her given advantage of powers and the lack of a fighting technique. Elizabeth Stark fights the way she lives, impulsively and without pattern. Her punches and kicks are expertly, but erratically delivered and it momentarily puts Barnes at a disadvantage that he easily overcomes.

She charges her hands electric, just enough for it to hit a notch below lethal, but before she can move, Barnes has got one hand, metal, in a tight grip on her wrist and he twists relentlessly. She feels a scream bubbling up her throat but Barnes’ other hand wraps around her neck, and she gasps for air, vision momentarily going dark as the scene alternates between the top floors of the Terrorist Centre and a port in Coastal Africa.

The Winter Soldier drops her, harshly so, when something blonde and buff throws himself at him, and they both fall to the ground. Steve recovers quicker and he’s up and at her side instantly, scanning her for injuries, taking note of the red on her wrist.

“Liz,”

She grips on his hands, squeezing tight only briefly, because Barnes has gotten up, “I’m okay.”

Steve Rogers and Elizabeth Stark, when they were strangers, friends, lovers, had always fought flawlessly alongside each other. The only ones who could give them a run for their money were probably Elizabeth and Tony Stark. Steve has learned to anticipate and incorporate Liz’s powers into the fight, while she knows when to move where in order to give the soldier full spatial capacity.

Barnes, despite bring practically unbeatable, is no match for Infinity and Captain America. Steve throws him to the wall within a matter of minutes and Liz has got a large ice wall that cages him in, trapping him between brick and frozen water.

“Help,” The cry comes from down below, far down below, and Liz recognizes the voice as Everett Ross, “We’ve got a man down. Does anyone copy? Man down, we need help.”

She panics for a moment, mentally cataloguing the people that she left behind, now eligible for being the ‘man down’; Tony, Natasha, T’Challa, Sharon, and Sam. She’s left at a crossroads between Barnes and the part of her that is a surgeon, the part that wears the white coat and hangs a stethoscope around her neck.

Steve tries to make it easier, “Go, save them. I’ve got this.”

Steve tries to make it easier, and she loves him for it, loves him for everything he is, with all she has.

But there’s a wound named trust that’s been picked at, slightly, but just enough for her to hesitate in leaving Steve and Barnes alone again.

So she asks, “You’re not going to leave?”

There’s a flicker in his expression, a shutter of something closed so fast she doesn’t know how to identify it, what to identify it as. But there’s a flicker in his expression, a shutter of something so close to heartbreak, something so close to regret, to guilt, that she pulls him close, drowns out the pounding of Barnes’ metal fist on the ice and the chaos downstairs until there is nothing but him.

“Don't leave.” She rasps out in a whisper, so hesitant and vulnerable.

_Don't leave me. _

He places gentle fingers under her chin and tips her head up, so that her eyes clash with his, blue on blue and he gives no warning, no indication before he presses his lips on hers. The kiss is everything Steve Rogers is, is everything that falling in love with Steve Rogers is but there’s an undertone of apologies and words and guilt and _I love yous _that she doesn’t decipher until much later.

He presses lips onto her forehead, and she feels the words as she hears them, “I won’t leave you.”

She pulls away but her hands still clutch his shirt; they don't know whose anchoring who, perhaps they have always anchored each other. Elizabeth Stark pulls away but there’s always one part of her that stays with Steve Rogers, a part of her that will never leave.

“Promise me you won’t leave, Steve,” She hears the desperation in her voice, she might as well be begging but her world is falling apart and she needs him, needs him to be safe and not chased by the government.

“I promise.”

And then she’s running to Tony. Running to Natasha and T’Challa and Sharon. She’s running towards them with absolute fear in her chest and prayers to a God she doesn’t believe in her lungs.

And then she’s helping people back up and sending them to the private health facility in the building. She’s putting on the white coat and hanging the stethoscope around her neck and marvelling at how easy it is to be Doctor Stark; easier than being Elizabeth and Infinity. 

And then she’s breaking apart in the bathroom. Breaking apart without tears or sobs. Without screams or cries. She’s breaking on the inside, layers slowly peeling off, cracks accumulating and pieces shaking violently.

She wonders if it would have hurt less if he didn't promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The funny thing about this was that I've had this chapter written since this December and every time I opened it to edit, I would get through the first line and give up, thus the long delay. I would promise that I'll do better next time, but we all know that would be a lie so.
> 
> See you again sometime next year.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm still alive. i'm still writing. i'm still going to forget to update.

**some people aren’t born into the world with bloody knives and holstered guns** **   
** **some people aren’t born into war and bloodshed but we aren’t those lucky ones **

“I don't think this is a good idea.” 

Liz breaks the tense silence in the elevator. It’s discerning; nothing with Natasha was ever tense, not even when the two of them had just met and Natasha was under implications that she was on a mission and Liz was under the impression that the agent was there to spy on them for Fury. 

With Natasha, it was easy to find common ground, it was easy to find equal footing, easy to just  _ be.  _

Perhaps she should blame the ambiance of disasters that keep striking them with relentless force as if hell-bent on keeping them apart. Perhaps it's because she knows that Barnes is a sore spot on Natasha’s story, a different kind of red on her ledger. Perhaps it's because she’s not the only one doing her share of breaking. 

Regardless, she breaks the tense silence in the elevator, telling her best friend that it isn’t a good idea to get T’Challa involved. 

Natasha raises an eyebrow at her; face coolly composed in a manner that makes Liz slightly envious, “I know.” 

She hears the silent ‘ _ we’re still doing it’  _ without any trouble. To an extent, Liz does recognize the need for more players. To some extent, Liz understands that they have thirty-six hours to bring Steve in before there’s a shoot on sight order issued on his head. 

To some extent, she understands that things have already blown way out of proportion. 

It's unfortunate that stubbornness happens to run in her veins, passed on from Howard to Tony to her, “Tasha, his motives are personal. He wants revenge. He means that kind that involves a coffin.” 

Natasha’s face crumples briefly and Liz rakes her eyes over the tired lines on her face and wilted posture. The familiar feeling of desperation crawls up her neck, threatening to choke her. The people around her are slowly crumbling and she can’t do anything to stop it. 

“I don’t think we have a choice, Liz,” Natasha whispers, her green eyes piercing the numbers on top of the elevator doors as if she can will it to go faster. 

“I don't want to fight,” Liz admits. 

_ I don't want to fight my team.  _

“Me neither.” 

For a moment. For a brief moment. For a fraction of a second, Elizabeth Stark and Natasha Romanoff strip bare of the layers thrown over each other, taking a moment to  _ feel  _ and  _ breathe  _ before they have to put a mask on and fight a war that shouldn’t be fought. For a moment, Natasha Romanoff and Elizabeth Stark bring down their defences and allow themselves to fear. 

The world refuses to give them more than a moment. 

They make their way into the parking lot, where soldiers - guards - are lined across the door; the Dora Milaje protecting their future King. 

“You ever been,” Natasha murmurs as they approach the women that have warrior etched into their stance, burned into their posture. 

“To Wakanda? God no. T’Chaka offered a couple of times for Tony to design things but he had denied. Didn't want to get involved too much in projects that Dad was obsessed with. They stopped contacting Tony when their own residential genius was born. Rumour is that she’s smarter than Bruce and Tony combined.” 

The conversation, more so questioning, ceases when they approach the five women lining outside the door where T’Challa now walks out of. 

“T’Challa,” Liz calls out and gets the man’s attention. He offers her a ghost of a smile and she increases her strides, only to be effectively blocked by one of the Dora Milaje. 

“Move or you will be moved.” 

There’s a hardness to this woman, built up by loyalty and years of training that she wears like an overcoat. There’s something fierce this woman stamps on her forehead, her lethal spread out like a second skin. This woman’s danger is worn proudly for the world to see. 

Elizabeth Stark was the kind of hardness that was acquired after breaking bone after bone. Elizabeth Stark’s fierce is the beating heart that refuses to break after hit after hit, her lethal running through her blood. Elizabeth Stark’s danger is tucked tightly under her skin, held thinly under control. 

Elizabeth Stark’s danger is explosive. 

So she raises a brow, because she’s tired and broken and her lethal is threatening to burst out, “You can try. Might not work out for you.” 

T’Challa interferes before something erupts, “While that would be entertaining, Ms. Stark is correct on this one.” He stares at her, humour barely hiding his sympathy, “Okoye is my best warrior, I’d rather her not be electrocuted.” 

Elizabeth Stark’s danger might be explosive, but her kindness is infinite. 

She breathes out the tension, blocks out the loss and sweeps her broken pieces under the rug and looks regretfully at the woman she now knows as Okoye, “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to—fight,” she gestures to T’Challa, “I just want to talk to him.”

“Are you okay?” T’Challa asks her. 

“Are you?” she retorts back, deflecting, because she doesn’t even know how to begin to answer that question. 

He chokes out what could have passed for a laugh if it weren’t for the underlying current of loss and grief. 

The conversation between T’Challa and Natasha is dulled down and far away, as if someone were dunking her head underwater. They’re talking about fights and conflict with the kind of detachment that makes her want to scream in frustration. 

Natasha makes her way into the car expecting her to follow but she waves her best friend away, “Go on, I’ll be there.” 

She turns to face T’Challa, and it's the knowing look that motivates her to tell him the truth, “You know that I'm not going to let you kill Barnes, right?” 

There’s no hatred for her, there’s nothing but revenge and determination “I know that you’re going to try.” 

She’s desperate. She really is. Not only will T’Challa’s hands be painted with red of an innocent, not only will Barnes undeservedly lose his life, but the ramifications will be severe, will affect the Avengers to a point of no return. 

“Look at me T’Challa, and tell that you really believe that killing Barnes is going to make anything better.” 

She can see the rest of the Dora Milaje watching closely in her peripheral vision, but she focuses on T’Challa. If she had looked away, however, she would have seen Okoye look at T’Challa with an expression similar to Liz’s; desperation and panic. 

“The world deserves to be rid of a killer.” There’s a waver in his voice and she sympathizes. To lose someone you loved so much, too early, so brutally is one of the curses the world throws at people who deserve better.

She smiles at him bitterly, “ _ You _ don't even believe that.” 

She walks away but then turns around, looking at the future King of a country that she believes will shape the future, “Your father was a good man. Don’t ruin that, T’Challa” 

She nearly collapses into the car, and sinks deeper into her exhaustion as Natasha reeves the engine and sends them flying through the streets of Berlin, to the private jet that she wishes would take her home instead of Germany. 

“Liz,” Natasha’s voice is soft, soothing, which is how she knows what’s coming. 

“ _ Don’t,”  _ it comes out sharper than intended, but her broken pieces are starting to come apart and she needs some time to glue them back together, “don't talk about anything,”  _ don't talk about him,  _ “I need to keep myself together for another thirty hours, Tasha. We talk and I collapse.” 

Her hands slip over Liz’s shoulder, as if she could take away the weight. Liz knows that Natasha Romanoff, the girl who cared even though the world has beaten her far too many times for doing so, would take away her weight if she could. 

The watch around her wrist pulses and lights up around Tony’s face, Tony’s smiling face and she accepts the call immediately, hoping that her brother found something else in Queens besides the fifteen-year-old boy that she doesn’t want to bring into this world but she knows her hopes are futile even before they appear on the screen. 

The kid’s excited, mumbling out words that don’t make sense and fumbling through the idea of fighting alongside Iron Man. He, Peter Parker, reminds her very much of Tony; the Tony before SI and Afghanistan and Iron Man. The Tony Stark that used to build robots in his bedroom and dance with her foot on top of his in the living room. 

“Tony,” She tries to wipe the smile off her face but the kid’s grin is so nostalgically infectious, “Make sure he knows everything. Make sure he knows both sides.” 

“I do, Ms.Stark” Peter nods his head rapidly, “Mr. Stark gave me a copy of the Accords. He said that you two are going to make it better. I think it's good you know,” he rubs the back of neck bashfully and Liz has to close her eyes so that no one sees the heartbreak because the action is  _ so Steve, “ _ protecting us little guys. You guys smash a lot of stuff. Not that we don’t appreciate you saving the world, cause we do,  _ I  _ do, but-”

“It’s okay Peter.” She tells him softly, “I get it.” 

Tony waves her goodbye and Peter adorably mimics the action before the screen goes blank and Liz rests her head against the headrest.

“Are you sure that kid’s not-” Natasha speaks up after being silent during the entire duration of the call. 

“Nope, not Tony’s kid. I checked.” 

When Natasha raises her eyebrow, Liz defends herself, “They look so similar. Kid’s a genius and has a superhero complex. I couldn’t  _ not  _ check.” 

“Liz, he’s a kid. It isn’t safe.” 

She looks out the windows as Natasha drives further and further away from the city, cutting through trees and forest to the patch of land where the jet is stationed in, “Hero complex remember. Kid’s not stopping anytime soon. We can take care of him this way. Besides, he’s fighting us, no one’s going to hurt him.” 

Natasha parks and they get out of the car, Liz following suite, “Stark cares about him.” 

Liz smiles at that, her first genuine smile since Steve left, “I know. Why else do you think I let Tony deal with the kid?” 

They share a laugh and for a moment, Liz allows herself to imagine that things would be different. Imagines that they’re taking a vacation, heading to Rome, meeting up with Steve and Tony and the rest of them. They’d stay in Hotel Eden, because Tony would want nothing less. He’d rack a fit about Liz and Steve sharing a room but then he’d invite Pepper and she’d show because she loves Tony too much to not. She’d like to think that she’d spend the day with Steve in bed, but in reality, the two of them would end up touring the place; go to the Colosseum, biking along the ancient streets, tossing a coin in the Trevi Fountain. 

She’d be happy. 

She’d put her broken pieces back together and this time they’d stick. 

And it's too much. The plane jolts in the air and subsequently jolts her back into reality. And it's too much. She’s tearing herself into pieces, spreading herself too thin. She’s not ready to confront Steve in Germany, not ready to ask why Wanda didn't trust her, doesn’t want to see Clint for the first time in months, only for him to point an arrow at her. 

She’s absolutely terrified that this might be the thing that breaks her for good. 

Her legs are stumbling their way to the jet’s entrance without her permission. Natasha’s looking at her with scared concern, probably trying to figure out if she needs to knock Liz out before she blows up their ride. 

She puts her hands in front of her, warding off Natasha from coming closer, “I need—I need to go.” 

She’s jumping out of the jet without thought or reason, Natasha’s shouts barely comprehensible through the rushing in her ears. 

The first time she fell with the intention to fly, she had to place all her concentration, nearly everything she had, into making sure her elements would wrap securely around her and lift her through the air, give her enough momentum and power to direct herself wherever she wanted to go. The result was an enormous headache and the kind of nausea that made her want to stick her head into the toilet for the whole day. 

Now, it's instinctive, as if the sheets of fire appear on their own, responding to the pressure exerting on her from falling. Now, she doesn’t have to think twice to soar through the sky, doesn’t have to try too hard, doesn’t have to pretend that she’s anything but the girl with fire in her blood and lightning in her veins. 

She doesn’t remember why and doesn’t know how, but somehow she’s knocking on the large wooden doors of the bungalow built on top of a hill in Singapore. 

There are tears in her eyes when Nick Fury opens the door and she tries to smile for him but he knows enough to see her desperately hanging onto her breaking pieces. 

“I shouldn’t be here,” Is what she says finally, after standing in his foyer and staring at the blank walls with a blank expression. 

He knows better than to assume that she’ll make herself at home, not when there’s a situation in a German airport that needs to be resolved, “But you are.” 

“But I am.” 

He sighs, the sound resonating through the large house that the Starks insisted he stay in, “I don’t know what you want me to say, Liz.” 

Her smile is bitter, “That I'm doing the right thing?” 

“You’re doing the right thing.”

The girl,  _ his little girl,  _ shakes her head in protest, and the movement causes a few tears to slip out of their own accord, “That’s not what I meant.” 

_ “You’re doing the right thing.”  _ He emphasizes, speaks louder and takes one step forward so that it affixes in her head. 

She’s looking at him utterly confused, so lost, “You think the Accords-”

“I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Accords. I’m talking about you. Your fighting for what you believe is right. You’re fighting for the little guys. You always fight for the little guys. You’re going to take the Accords and make it better. So,” He says again, he’ll say it again and again until it sticks, “You’re doing the right thing.” 

“What if I'm not?” 

He doesn’t let her see how much this is killing him. Nick Fury doesn’t allow himself to be one of the names in Elizabeth Stark’s regret list, so he doesn’t show her how much this is hurting; to look at the girl he spent his entire life trying to protect, the girl who he had tried to give the life of normalcy she deserved, to see that girl standing in front of him, barely keeping her cracked pieces together. 

“Some people, honey,” He starts, trying to make this better for both of them, “some people are born into the world and leave without seeing a single drop of blood. Some people don't ever have to wield knives or shoot a gun or let red seep into their fingers. Some people get lucky and are born into a different kind of world.” 

There’s a sadness to her smile, “We’re not those kinds of people.” 

He shakes his head, “I tried so hard to keep you away from all this. Tried so hard. I failed.” 

“Fury—”

He doesn’t let her protest, he continues, even though he isn’t sure whether this will do more harm or good, “I failed because I don’t get to choose the world you’re born into, no one does. I don't get to choose the world you live in. You do. And you were thrust into the world of weapons and wars but you had a chance to leave. But you  _ didn't.”  _

“There’s no right or wrong in this world, Elizabeth. There’s just the next battle, the next war. The question is; which side are you on? If you can fight for your side with everything you have, if you can stand firm in what you believe in, if you can come out broken and bruised but with the important parts of what makes you, you, then you’re doing it right.” 

And Elizabeth Stark was always good at fixing people. She was good at picking up the thread and needle to stitch humanity back together, close their open wounds, stop their bleeding. 

So it only makes sense that she would be able to do the same with her; fix her cracked pieces with a bit of tape and glue, and make it work because she needs it. 

“The Accords are bullshit.” She declares, voice stronger, ten times stronger, than it was when she first arrived. 

Fury is silent, but urges her to continue. The Avengers can survive a couple of minutes without Elizabeth Stark. 

“But I’m signing it. Because we need the UN as much as they need us. Because we do deserve to be held accountable for our mistakes. Because people deserve to feel safe, because they deserve to have their input.” 

“But I'm not going to let them manhandle us around. I’m going to take it away from Ross. I’m going to implement changes that don’t make us monsters. I'm going to try and get justice for Barnes. I’m going put the people’s faith back in the Avengers.” 

The universe doesn’t ask before shoving people into different worlds, the universe doesn’t ask if they want to wield knives and shoot guns, the universe doesn’t warn them that they’ll fight battle after battle. 

Fury knows Elizabeth Stark deserves better than this world. He’s spent his entire life fighting this world from getting to Elizabeth Stark. 

He’s starting to think that maybe this world chose Elizabeth Stark for a reason. He’s starting to suspect that the reason why he couldn’t prevent this world from grabbing Elizabeth Stark in a chokehold was because this world needed her. This world needs her lightning and fire and tenacious stubbornness and infinite kindness and indestructible determination. 

This world so desperately needed Elizabeth Stark because this world knew that only she can make it better. 

And if Nick Fury cannot fight this world from getting to Elizabeth Stark, then he can help her make it fractionally better than how it was before she walked in. 

So, after Infinity flies out to an airport in Germany, he pulls up the papers from a safe locked securely under passcode, biometric recognition, retinal scan and thumbprint and places it flat on his desk. 

_Reinstatement of the Strategic_ _Homeland Intervention Enforcement And Logistics Division _

And, acting upon the idea that he had been humouring since 2008, the decision that he had made when he learned that SHIELD was compromised, when one of the thoughts that ran through his head was;  _ she would have never let this happen,  _ he flips through the paper and, under the line asking him to indicate Director, he writes, unflinchingly confident. 

_ Elizabeth Maria Stark  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I'm not entirely sure how accurate I am from a legal perspective. I'm not sure if it is possible to resurrect a once large, powerful and now publicly tainted organization with a few signs and a legal document so bare with me and my fictional rules.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, it's been a super long time, but my life has been an onslaught of crisis after crisis and I simply did not have the time to sit down and type anything out and I appreciate you guys for being patient with me. Hope you enjoy this chapter

**i thought i’d say i love you and it’d be poetry, it’d be art  
instead i say i love you but i'm left with a broken heart**

Elizabeth Stark, Steve thinks, is the closest thing Earth has to an angel. Her lightning is her halo and her fire her wings. She falls from the sky so softly, so gently and the ground pulses with tiny streaks of electric blue, beautiful enough to look like shimmers of magic.

Infinity; Infinity is destructive, a volcano at her best. That indiscriminate part of Elizabeth who makes her lightning lethal and her fire burning is all impulse and raw power. Infinity soars through the sky and crashes to the ground with less elegance and grace and more vigour and passion.

Steve Rogers has yet to decide which part of Elizabeth Stark he loves more.

He supposes being irrevocably in love with her means that he loves both just the same; the same way Liz loves the part of him that has a thirst for war and the desperate need to hold onto his shield and the part of him that needs quiet when sketching and needs music when cooking.

Infinity, in all her volcanic lethalness, is the one that lands—crashes, really—in between the two charging teams, creating a large enough force that sends everyone reeling back.

It’s Infinity that crashes to the ground and creates a burst of power strong enough to extend throughout the entire airport, but it’s Elizabeth Stark that looks at both sides, Steve and Tony, in particular, eyes pleading and desperate.

“What are we doing?”

“You heard Ross, Lizzie,” Tony calls out, seemingly content to stay put for the time being, “Thirty-six hours.”

Steve argues from the other side, Barnes and Sam inching closer to him as if they think that in the split-second Steve loses his focus, Tony will shoot, “And we need to get to the other Winter Soldiers.”

Liz shares a look with her brother and glares when he shrugs, admitting that he didn't take the time to hear Steve out, “What other Winter Soldiers?”

Steve explains, “There are more of them Liz. HYDRA has them. If we don't get to them before—”

His unspoken warning of catastrophe is well understood amongst the superheroes who were seconds away from fighting each other.

“Okay,” Liz says after a second, in the thoughtful tone that she uses when trying to appease the Council she’s been dealing with ever since SHIELD went down, the tone she uses when considering a diagnosis, “Okay, we can go get the Soldiers. I’m assuming you know where they are,” she looks at Steve and he nods, some of the tension around his frame easing.

She wonders if it should physically hurt to push away the feelings—because _God, she felt—_and bring forth reason.

“But,” she approaches the subject carefully, treading through murky waters with no saviour in sight, “you still need to come with us.”

Steve grows impatient and angry at the two-step forwards one step back game they’ve been playing ever since the Accords were dropped in front of them, “Liz,” he grounds out.

“Hey, hear me out, okay.” She waits for him to calm down and when she sees that he does, she continues, “Tony’s right. Ross gave us a thirty-six-hour window. After that, it's shoot on sight, for both of you. Now you can go and find the Soldiers, but then what? You’ve got fifty-two countries hunting your ass. You come with us, we sort this shit out with Ross, and go to wherever you need to go as a team.”

Steve shakes his head at her, “You are not naive enough to believe that Ross will just let me and Buck go.”

“Maybe not. But he’ll let _me _go.”

“And then what, Liz?” He asks her challengingly, calling her out on her half plan.

She stumbles for a second before retorting right back, “And then we get the other Winter Soldiers, we don’t fight, and you all don't become criminals.”

Steve shakes his head bitterly, taking a step back unconsciously, “And then we sign the Accords.”

“Steve—” She’s practically pleading now, and there’s so much anger and hurt and tension between both sides for anyone to note the hurt in her eyes.

“It’s not going to work, Liz,” Steve tells her, his voice finding a softer octave and she’s ashamed to say that she’d imagined him saying the words under much different circumstances, that he’d realize that he couldn’t look at her when it was her bolt that killed his first love, or that she never really has time for him between being an Avenger, dealing with the Council and her hospital and realize that it wasn’t going to work, “We’d waste too much time going back and convincing Ross of the other soldiers and by the time we get the clear, if we even get the clear, it’ll be too late.”

Elizabeth Stark has already had too many dreams of the people she loves staring back at her lifelessly, their cold bodies thrown carelessly on the ground, blood leaking out of their person. She’s not going to wake up tomorrow only to hear that Steve Rogers was shot by a sniper because he had disobeyed some asshole and didn't sign some stupid paper that meant nothing in the grand scheme of things.

If there were anything that Elizabeth Stark can count on, it would be her fierce need to protect the very few people this life had allowed her to have.

So she steels her heart and places metal across her spine and tucks away the box marked feelings and stands her ground, “It's the only choice you have.”

She ought to have reckoned that it was never a good idea to back Steve Rogers into a corner. There’s steel in his eyes and she recognizes his stance, “Move, Liz.”

“No. You want to get through. Get through me.”

“Okay.”

He runs, supersoldier speed and Elizabeth braces herself for the impact that Steve has no intention of making. Tony Stark doesn’t care for Steve’s well intentions and hidden agendas because the second he sees the supersoldier charging at his sister, he has his gauntlet out and fires at the Captain’s chest, causing the man to go flying through the air, landing a few feet from where the rest of the heroes on the team come charging at each other, resuming the battle that Liz had intended to cease when she landed.

T’Challa heads straight for Barnes. There was a second, a split second where he remembered _“Your father was a good man. Don’t ruin that, T’Challa”_ and _“Look at me T’Challa, and tell me that you really believe that killing Barnes is going to make anything better.” _But then they were all charging at each other, anger in their hearts and war in their brains and he allowed himself to be enticed by the urge to avenge his father, the idea that the only way he’d do that is by killing Barnes.

The airport is in chaos and T’Challa thinks, even as he’s fighting Barnes, making the punches hurt and the kicks pain, that this was the reason why the Accords were created in the first place; they’re completely obliterating an airport and the Starks should not be the only one paying the price for their mistakes as they usually do.

He’s slowly starting to get the upper hand; he’s fuelled by the kind of motivation that makes him angrier than the Soldier who has more to be angry at the world for, suffered far worse than T’Challa can even imagine, but T’Challa is grief and bloodthirsty and Bucky Barnes is only holding onto the semblance of control he has. So his claws come out and they nearly pierce flesh, before he feels electricity and a rope of blue has wrapped around his wrist.

Elizabeth Stark stands a few feet away, looking at him regretfully but unapologetically, “I told you I wasn't going to let you kill him.”

It is unfair of him to do so, she’s only trying to protect his hands from being bloody and his mind from being tainted, but T’Challa snaps at Elizabeth, changing course to charge at the girl who, to his muddled mind, is standing in his way of retribution.

Before T’Challa can get to her, he’s slammed into a cargo box by red, and Elizabeth for a second, wants to think that Wanda might have been watching her back, helping her instead of fighting against the opposite side.

_She’ll learn much later that she was right _

With Wanda occupying T’Challa, Liz is the one that obstructs the pathway that’s supposed to lead Bucky to Steve, who’s still fighting Tony Stark.

She smiles at him, and there isn’t an ounce of malice or fear, just repressed apology and thinly veiled curiosity, “I can’t let you go either.”

He can regretfully say that he was the one that threw the first punch, the punch that she so easily dodges before waiting for him to throw the next one. It occurs to him, as they’re fighting, that she isn’t trying, not really. He’s known her to blow a country into pieces, seen the fire and lightning that’s lethal enough to end this fight in a matter of seconds.

He wonders why, for all that he’s heard about Elizabeth Stark; angry, powerful, dangerous, just a little broken, no one’s ever bothered to mention that she’s somehow infinitely kind, cares a little too much.

“So,” she drags out in between punches, “what do I call you?’

He’s been fighting for decades longer than she’s been alive, but the aid of her powers, the lightning that shocks just enough to sting for a second and nothing more, makes her an equal opponent. She catches him off guard with the question, and he steps back a little, asking, “What?”

She responds, trying to grab a hold of him, “Your name.” A kick, “Do I call you Bucky or Mr. Barnes?” An ice shield that protects her from his punch, “I'm going to assume that the Winter Soldier is a no.”

They separate to take a breath. She braces her hands on her knees and he tries to breathe through the slight ache in his ribs as he considers her question, “James. Call me James.”

He doesn’t know who Bucky Barnes is. That man, the man that might have been worth this fight, that man died falling from a train, that man is unrecognizable when he looks in the mirror. That man might be gone forever.

Elizabeth Stark smiles at him, genuine when she says, “Nice to meet you, James. I’m Liz.”

He’s about to tell her that it’s his absolute pleasure, because it really is. But then Sam swoops in from behind him and he’s flying through the air, Colonel Rhodes hot on their tail and Elizabeth Stark nothing but a mere blip on the ground.

“I like her,” he says, into the earpiece.

“Who?” Steve asks, breaths coming out slightly harsh, even though his voice hasn’t lost the strength that only Steve Rogers can muster.

“Your teammate,” Bucky replies, blissfully unaware that somewhere along the line, his best friend has fallen in love, “Elizabeth Stark.”

The name causes the Captain to trip slightly, which Peter Parker uses to his advantage, webbing the soldier before trying, once again, to grab onto the shield.

The next thing he knows is that he’s trying to carry a large cargo box and partially succeeding but he’s letting Captain America get away and he doesn’t know much about this fight he’s fighting but he knows that if the government gets to the Captain before Mr. Stark does, then America’s National Hero is as good as dead.

He would clap his hands and cheer at the top of his lungs if he could when there’s an ice blast and Ms. Stark is walking towards him.

“What happened to staying away from the big guns?”

Thin ice begins to form on top of where his hands are holding the cargo box and it gives him enough time to slip out from under the weight before it crashes to the ground. He runs back into the fight after that, remembering Mr. Stark’s words of leaving Steve and Liz alone suppose they get the opportunity.

Because alone, without brothers and best friends and Accords and Vengeful Kings, without the need to look out for their team or keep track of the other, Steve Rogers takes one look at Elizabeth Stark and sees everything that he’s missed—or maybe ignored—prior to her standing a few feet in front of him with her hands balled into fists at her side and stance tensed away from him.

She looks so uncharacteristically broken, looks like she’s trying and failing to find the missing pieces that he pulled away from her when he said ‘promise’ without meaning it, the whole that’s slowly being chipped away as they’re fighting the people they consider family in an empty airport lot in Germany.

She’s so fragmented; so unlike the Elizabeth Stark that was bursting with enough wholeness to give to others—_him_—slowly filling in the missing pieces with a smile and chance.

She’s breaking, they both are, and there isn’t anything he can do that’ll fix the both of them. Maybe if Liz had told him earlier about the Accords, maybe if he’d given her more time to explain, maybe if she had waited before signing the Accords, maybe if he had just listened to her and _stayed. _

Maybes aren’t enough for them, not anymore.

“I'm doing what’s best, Steve.” She tells him, hands still balled into fists at her side.

And aren’t they all? Aren’t they all just doing their form of what is best, by their definition? Aren’t they all just taking a gamble on the train wreck of a mess that is this life and hoping, praying, that today won’t be the day the world has decided that they aren’t enough anymore?

So he tells her, “We’re all doing what’s best, Liz. We just don't have similar ideas in mind.”

“And what’s your idea of best,” she spits out harshly, “becoming a criminal? Making enemies of fifty-two countries?”

Steve’s mislead by her anger. Her anger doesn’t span from fury, hatred, or the idea that she’s doing the right thing. She’s angry because she’s desperate and scared of the life she has, the life she’d never thought she’d have, slowly being taken away from her and she’s trying so hard to keep everything together but it’s only falling apart with less abandon than before and she’s lost.

It's catastrophic; the way fear and loss and desperation can so quickly turn into anger.

Steve takes a step forward, his stance of ‘_I don’t like bullies’ _so familiar to Liz, “Your idea of best is letting the government handcuff our hands behind our backs and giving them the keys.”

They’ve had arguments before, Steve Rogers and Elizabeth Stark. They’ve fought about mundane things like unwashed dishes and where to put the sofa, they’ve fought about things only they can fight about, calls made during a mission and the disregard for the precious blood coursing through their veins. Elizabeth Stark is harsh and unwavering; she did not become CEO of a hospital at age 21 by subduing to the men and women that thought her not enough, never mind that her intellect was far greater than anyone in that board room.

Steve Rogers had an instinctive response to any harshness and fight being directed his way; make a fist and straighten his spine and look at the enemy and assess the warzone. It didn't matter that he was six foot with impossibility in his system or that the enemy was the woman he loved and the warzone their home. His response to a fight was to fight back and that’s what he did; matching harsh words for harsh words and bite for bite.

They’d easily come back together after exploding and tearing each other apart, finding missing pieces on the floor and carefully stitching them back together, until they were almost as good as new.

It didn't change the fact that, if they had more time together, Elizabeth Stark would have had to come to terms with the fact that not everyone is trying to undermine her, not everyone is out to shove a machine into her neck to push her down and Steve Rogers would have had to learn to loosen his fists and sometimes learn to appease, learn that fighting fire with fire isn’t always the best route to take.

But they didn’t have more time together.

Their time wasn’t enough.

“I told you that it would be temporary.” Liz grits out through her teeth.

“What would be temporary?” Steve’s voice raises an octave, “Wanda being locked in the compound? Us having to stay away from the crisis until the UN collectively unlock the cuffs? Bucky being in a prison instead of getting the help he needs? How long is temporary, Liz?”

And he will only remember much later the way Liz slightly flinches at his harsh tone, the way the fight slowly, but surely, drains out of her, until she’s left with nothing but an aching tiredness at fighting for so long and a broken heart, “I thought you were supposed to be a patient guy.”

And maybe this is good for Steve, letting go of the things stuck in his chest that they forced down because he’d done the government wrong and, subsequently, lost the right to argue his case, let words loose, “I've lost seventy years of my life. Seventy years, Liz. I've lost everything and Buck,” he chokes up and Liz listens, _Liz always listens, _“Bucky’s the only thing I’ve got. I've got to protect the only thing I've got.”

_You’ve got me, _she wants to say. The words end up choking her, stuck in her throat, refusing to budge out. It hurts, she’ll admit, it hurts, just a little, the way Steve so easily prioritizes Bucky Barnes over everything. She knows she cannot be the one to complain, she’d do the same for Tony if the world ever came down to it, so she knows that she cannot complain.

It doesn’t really stop it from hurting.

“Look, the Steve Rogers I know, he’s impulsive and rash and quite honestly, he doesn’t think of himself before running headfirst into the line of fire. But he’s always looking out for the people, right? The Steve Rogers I know wouldn’t risk all these people,” Liz points to the fight that’s being fought behind her, “The Steve Rogers I know had a little more faith in me.”

She should have known her next words would have cut deep for the man out of time, for the man who had to find himself amongst a strange land and stranger people, for the man who hangs onto thin strings of his identity, protects it like ornate glass because it truly is, everything that can make or destroy him.

“This isn’t you.”

She should have known it would have cut deep. She should have known that Steve Rogers fights fire with fire and that he would have cut deep as well, tried to cut deeper.

“And you would know, wouldn’t you? Steve Rogers, America’s National Symbol, Avenger, _goddamn_ perfect soldier. You hand me a document that is everything I hate put into words, you hand me a pen with a smile and tell me you know who I am. You tell me to let the authorities deal with my innocent friend, tell me to stay when staying means Ross will put me in chains, tell me to stand down as if it were ever in my nature and you say you know me.”

His words are less bite, more cut as he progresses, the malicious tone Liz knows she’ll have a hard time removing from her head and he hits the nail on the coffin when he’s in her space in quick strides stabbing her with his gaze, “How the hell do you know who I am?”

And she, with a bitter smile and tears obstructing her view of Steve Rogers, the wetness causing the world to become momentarily glassy before she blinks them away, straightens her spine, looks him in the eyes, and feels her pieces start to crash to the ground, “I fell in love you.”

He rears back as if shocked and she looks down at the ground, seeing the tear fall and heaving in a sob because she can’t cry, not now.

He’d known. Steve Rogers had known. They’d never said the words and honestly, he’d forget sometimes because he’d say it so often in his head; when she smiles up at him, when she picks him up after a fight, when she’s engrossed in a medical file. But he’d known that she loved him; thought that maybe she loved him as much as he loved her. Thought that he’d be the one to say it.

_He hadn’t told her because he wanted it to be perfect and, call him a sap; he wanted it to be romantic and memorable. _

He takes a step forward and, in a rare form of masochism, memorizes the heartbreak on her face, the broken shards of what used to be whole in a smile that’s everything bitter and nothing happy, the death in the eyes that used to glow galaxies, the shattered spine of a girl who used to carry planes and countries and broken men out of time. He takes a step forward and memorizes the way she takes a quick step back, as if he’d hurt her if he came closer, as if he’d hurt her enough and coming closer would be the straw that breaks her back.

Then she’s turning around and running away. _Like the wind, _he thinks; _Elizabeth Stark is like the wind. _

Then again, maybe he’s wrong.

He’s the one running this time. Natasha helps him and he doesn’t know why and doesn’t know how and doesn’t understand anything but he runs.

Doesn’t know anything as he’s on a helicopter with one of the two people that mean too much with five words crashing through his head with a deafening roar.

_“I fell in love with you.” _


	9. Chapter 9

**there is love in every line, in every curve, in all the shades and the hues  
i guess they’re not wrong when they say all artists fall in love with their muse**

“I apologize for attacking you,” He starts by saying when he walks into the room that is temporarily being used as hers, the cold decor making her look out of place in the billion-dollar building structured in one of Germany’s most beautiful cities.

Elizabeth Stark smiles at him. It's more of a tip of the lips rather than the smile T’Challa knows she’s capable of, but it's genuine and he has to wonder how deeply she has engraved kindness into her soul despite the world trying time and time to push it out.

“Really? Cause I could have sworn your claws were coming at me. You’re taking this whole Panther thing real serious by the way.” It's a joke, but a positive response to his olive branch and he takes it readily.

T’Challa shrugs, opting to play along with the obvious deflection of the situation, pretends to ignore, just for a moment that there is heartbreak etched into her eyes and grief forced into his, “The ears are a part of the costume, I'm afraid.”

“A tragedy, I'm sure. But hey, Steve walks around with a giant star on his chest so,” she winces after the sentence falls out of her mouth and the action is instinctive and hard to miss even though she recovers swiftly afterward.

It reminds him of the reason he searched out Elizabeth in the first place, reminds him that along the way, the anger just dissipated and left him feeling nothing but tired.

“I told Ross,” _of Natasha’s betrayal _he wants to say, but he’s the reason Elizabeth Stark has lost one more and it's indisputably guilt that prevents him from saying her name, his pride that stops him from acknowledging his mistake.

Elizabeth’s guard rises, her eyes turning steel and her stance turning cold, betraying nothing, and T’Challa remembers his father telling him once, “_Don’t be fooled by the apparent transparency and lenient casualness. These Starks, they protect their own with the kind of fierceness that is unparalleled across the planet.” _

T’Challa presses on, attempting to salvage the part of her that he broke, “He called for her arrest but couldn’t find Ms. Romanoff anywhere.”

The steel that is her eyes chips just a little to reveal relief even as her hackles rise a little higher and her stance grows fiercer, “Is that so?”

_They protect their own with the kind of fierceness that is unparalleled across the planet._

“I am genuinely sorry.” His hands go behind his back and he bows his head, just a little to show his apology. When he looks up, the cold has slipped away and hackles lowered. There’s something that resembles understanding directed at him and it prompts him to continue – he owes this woman, this woman who has done nothing but try and help him, he owes her an explanation.

“I have to go home and see my mother who has just lost her husband. My kingdom lost their King. My little sister is too young to have lost a father.”

She smiles at him empathetically, her kindness seeping through without permission, “_You’re _too young to lose your father.”

T’Challa shrugs, remembering seeing the news of Howard and Maria Stark’s death on the television all those years ago, remembers holding onto his father and mother just a little tighter when the camera managed to get a brief shot of a much younger Tony and Elizabeth Stark holding each other as if they would break if one of them let go, “I know some who has lost theirs at much younger.”

She shakes her head, “Loss is a loss. It doesn’t make it any easier to lose ten years later or earlier. Your grieving T’Challa, it’s okay to grieve.”

“Not to kill.” T’Challa finishes for her, the teasing note in his voice an attempt to bring the room back to how it was before he brought up their skeletons.

She collapses on her chair, and he takes a moment to note just how exhausted she looks, the weight of the world that should not be on her shoulders inarguably present even as she jokes, “Well, if you decide to sink your claws into Ross, I wouldn’t complain.”

He hates to be the one to bring it up, but he knows someone has to, “You do plan on doing something about him, right?”

She waves away his concerns, wilting further into the leather chair, “Getting him out is going to be easy. He’s issued a shoot on sight threat for a living legend. People aren’t going to respond favourably to that. We can bring in the old case files with Bruce and his unstable history with the rest of the Avengers but it's probably not going to come to that since he’s rubbed shoulders with the UN the wrong way ever since this Accords debacle started.”

Her eyes drift close before she blinks herself back to conscious and T’Challa steps towards the door making his way out, “Anything you need Elizabeth, Wakanda is on your side.”

She smiles at him with the kindness he knows is engraved deeply into every inch of her being. The kindness that he knows will put up a fight before it can be forced away, “I’ll take you up on that offer.”

Perhaps he should have closed the door and walked away to Wakanda instead of making his way into the raft where Tony Stark speaks with Sam Wilson.

Perhaps he should have done exactly what he did.

Perhaps kindness isn’t enough for this cruel world anymore.

`~*~`

It’s a jarring kind of chaos, the one raging battle in his head, the one that doesn’t know if he should scream Hydra or Steve. The mess that is his brain feels never-ending; unrepairable. He doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t know where the Winter Soldier ends and Bucky Barnes begins; doesn’t know if either person exists any longer.

He’s not worth it, he tells Steve as much; he’s not worth fifty-two countries, not worth the Avengers, not worth watching James Rhodes fall to the ground as Tony Stark screams his name in fear.

Steve keeps his gaze trained to the empty sky, flying the Quinjet with the kind of confidence that somehow reminds Bucky of the thin, sickly kid who used to get into fights every other day and kept going back for more.

He ought to know by now that no matter the time or place, Steve Rogers is never going to learn when to stop.

He opens his mouth to speak but the words claw against his throat, refusing to come out; two years ago and the wrong words lead to the kind of pain that shred him inside out, made him less man and more monster.

He doesn’t realize his hand’s at his neck until Steve is looking concernedly at him, the Quinjet suspended in the air without movement, “Buck?”

He wants to tell Steve that Bucky Barnes may no longer exist, wants to tell him that the man had probably died the day he fell off a train, wants to tell him that he may have his mind back but he’s never going to have Bucky.

Instead, he clears his throat and rasps, “Water?”

Steve gives him half a smile, “In the duffle bag.”

He unzips the bag and feels the corners of his lips tip up at the organization that screams Steve. Whatever little contents the supersoldier had managed to deem worth bringing has been meticulously placed into the bag; shirts folded into squares, papers tucked into notebooks and water bottle fitted neatly at the side. Bucky twists the cap and takes one, then two, then three precarious gulps, soothing his parched throat, welcoming the cold liquid seeping into his system, believing, only for a fraction of a moment, that the water will be enough to clean the rotten inside of him.

It's a simple thing, but the water makes him breathe a little easy, loosen his taut muscles and look out the window at the clear sky, truly knowing that his world has automatically become that much better because he’s got Steve beside him; Steve who has always been beside him, Steve, who has never left.

Steve, who looks like someone had clawed their way into his chest and yanked out his heart, veins and all, and left him there to bleed.

Bucky Barnes knows a little something about bleeding.

He looks down, back into the green duffle bag just in time for the sun to hit the box of carefully constructed metal and he takes one of them; the small lethal object and holds it in between his small lethal fingers.

“You plan on starting a war?” Bucky’s tone is tinged with the smallest of humour, referring to the several bullets that have been packed into the duffle bag, boxes and boxes of ammunition, as if someone emptied their entire inventory.

Steve shrugs, a nearly imperceptible movement, “Sam packed them. Said it would do you well to have the backup.”

Bucky feels his brows raise, remembering wings and talons and maniac smile and brittle humour, “You know he was making fun of me, right?”

His best friend huffs out what could maybe pass for laughter if it were anyone else and steers the jet slightly to the right, the little dot on the screen blinking without fazing, more assured than neither one of them are right now, “Ya, I know.”

Bucky shakes his head and proceeds to dig through the remaining contents of the duffle bag, pulling out caps and energy bars and small knives before putting them back in their place. He feels the distinctive hardness as he’s tucking in the knives into the sides and disarranges the precariously organized items to pull out the wooden box placed safely at the bottom of the bag.

There is no hint of dust or damage to the small wooden chest that used to sit on the shelf of the Rogers residence placed right next to the dining table, acting as tangible evidence of Sarah Rogers’ habit of keeping a tight grip on Steve’s first socks and toy and paintbrush despite her son’s hassling to throw them out.

He finds the compass first, when he opens it, the creak of the old hinges making a sound in the previously silent aircraft that causes Steve to turn around a shoot him an exasperated look that does a poor job at hiding the tight expression on his face when he spots the box open.

“Buck, put that away.”

He’s always had a hard time taking Steve Rogers seriously, even after he was no longer 5 feet tall and weighed a hell of a lot more than 120 pounds and failed to resemble a stick, “Can’t believe you still have this compass. After all this time-”

He opens the device to find Peggy Carter’s face staring back and ignores the jab of nostalgia, the deep undercurrent of _I miss _that he’s been trying so hard to ignore for the past seventy years, knowing that if he doesn’t, he’ll be sucked into the kind of oblivion that’ll never let him go.

He closes the locket and puts it away, mentally cataloguing brown hair and red lipstick for the next time he wakes up in a panic with the squeeze in his heart at the fear of forgetting again, the next time he has to recite names and habits and dates to tell himself that he’s no longer someone else’s monster.

The Moleskine catches his attention next, prompting him to ignore Sarah Rogers’ bracelet, and the case that’s supposed to hold Steve’s dog tags but is empty. He picks up the black book, held together by a thin elastic, pristine in its condition except for the creases at the spine, indicating habitual use. 

The first page is of the Avengers Tower, only this time, the letters on the side of the building spell out Stark in flashy letters Steve had barely bothered to perfect. The next page is of a park; paved pathways and rose bushes and a wide expense of grass with a single heel in the middle, contrasting greatly with the scene but somehow managing to fall right in place.

The next couple of pages are all rough reflections of everything that is Steve Rogers in the twenty-first century. The drawings are hastily done and almost always half-finished, but Bucky can recognize the red of hair that is Natasha Romanoff and the futuristic machinery that is Tony Stark. He can picture Clint Barton flipping pancakes into the air while Elizabeth Stark and Thor Odinson try and catch them with their plates and Bruce Banner with his head buried in a book while Nick Fury glares at Tony Stark as he fist bumps his sister behind his back.

He startles when he flips the next page, anticipating another insight to the enigma that is the Avengers but instead finds a set of eyes staring back at him, blue, bold and bright. Bucky would have flipped the page as he did when the lines on the page sparked no recognition but the familiarity of the eyes makes him pause. Within the blue are streaks of what could pass as gold, surrounded by a light orange, the colour of flames, the same flames of the girl with a too kind smile and punch that hurts.

Elizabeth Stark’s eyes.

She’s wearing a dress three drawings later, something floral and flowing, and she’s standing in a room, Steve’s room, if the compass on the side and his shield against the cupboard are any indications, but the room pales in comparison to the girl who is obviously the subject. It's as if the artist dulled the rest of it down, made her sharper and focused. It’s as if the artist found that the entire world dulled in comparison to the girl with the floral dress and blue eyes.

Bucky Barnes had always assumed that he’d be there when his best friend fell in love, would get to see Steve’s eyes light up and smile soften. The notion died when he fell off a train; everything died when he fell off a train. He supposes that this is what they call a small mercy from the universe; watching his best friend fall in love through pages and pages of drawings; pages of carefully stroked lines and carefully smudged shades that scream _i love you. _

He flips through pages of Elizabeth Stark smiling in Steve’s shirt, pages of her working with wires, hugging the shield, looking at a hologram, frowning at what seems to be burnt toast. He doesn’t look twice at the close studies of her eyes that glow fire, the freckles along her ear, Sarah Rogers’ bracelet around the wrist that pulses with lightning, the waves of water along her fingers – those drawings are a door to something more intimate and he may be a bastard, but he does have boundaries, knows when to respect others’ boundaries.

The last page of the sketchbook that is nine-tenths Elizabeth Stark is of her lying horizontally on the grass, head cushioned on the artist’s thighs, nose buried in a book. The setting around her is drawn in hasty lines and butchered ticks but she’s finished; she’s always finished – as if the artist had memorized the dip of her shoulders and the lines of her jaws and streaks of her eyes to finish the drawing without his muse present.

Bucky looks at the only friend he ever really had; his stubborn, infinitely good friend who’s fallen in love but stares straight at the sky with a death grip on the wheel, obviously aware of his soul being bared a seat behind him.

When this is over, he’ll ask how long it took for the artist to fall in love with his muse.

Perhaps he should have realized the world was never kind enough to let everything be over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I was gone for a long time so here is my apology in the form of two chapters. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and practicing social distancing.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pretty sure this is the longest chapter of this fic and justifiably so, in my opinion. Hope you enjoy

**war; what a useless concept, a tasteless idea, an idiotic thing to begin  
war; did no one ever mention that there is not one war you can win**

Here’s the thing about war. No one ever really wins. The whole prospect of victor and loser is just a smokescreen to hide the harsh reality of what war really entails. Soldiers come back home with a broken consciousness, a broken mind; a broken heart. Lives are lost, sanity is forgotten, love is unrecognizable, and all that is left over is a shell of a human being; a person that was once full of life but is now stuck in the everlasting loop of destruction and death that they cannot leave.

Here’s the thing about war; you will always lose. 

Steve Rogers and Tony Stark did not realize this as the latter barges into the cold Siberian bunker; hoping for a chance to fix things with the hero he spent his childhood worshipping.

“It’s good to see you, Tony,” He meant it. Steve Rogers really did. He didn't know when and where, but somehow, the intelligent billionaire had become one of his best friends, and he had never wanted to lose that.

Tony Stark returns the sentiment, and he loses his playful tone to tell his teammate, his friend, “You too, Cap.”

Bucky Barnes watches the interaction with a rapid fascination. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours yet and he has battled a series of superheroes led by Stark, learnt that Steve had fallen in love with Elizabeth Stark, and now Iron Man himself walks into the room and calls a truce with his best friend and he’s supposed to drop the gun down and braid his hair? Not happening.

So even though his gun is down by his side after Steve gestures for him to do so, his thumb is placed firmly at the trigger, in case this is all an elaborate trap to get to him and Steve. He doesn’t think his machine gun would do much good against whatever Stark’s suit is made up of, but he can damn well bet that he can hold the billionaire off until Steve gets the window to escape and save his friends.

“We need to go.” Steve implores impatiently. The main goal was to get here before Zemo and while Tony’s presence is more than a good thing, he needs to get to the Winter Soldiers now.

But the philanthropist shakes his head in refusal, “We’re waiting on someone.”

Steve vaguely sees Bucky aim his gun at Stark once again from his peripheral vision and he hisses out through clenched teeth, “I thought you said no one knows.”

“No, I said Ross doesn’t know,” Tony corrects, “Besides, I'm sure you wouldn’t mind her.”

And just as the words are being said, Elizabeth Stark walks into the room, changed into a new suit, purple and blue with just enough black to make it look lethal, her entire attention focused on the sleek device in her hands, trying to figure out precisely where she is and what relevance it has to her.

“Tony, I have had the worst day of my entire life and I really just want to go home, curl up into a ball with some whisky and just cry, so the sooner you plan on telling me what the hell I'm doing in some deserted Siberian Bunker, the sooner I can go home and do all those things preferably in the same—” The exact moment Liz sees Steve and his partner in crime is the exact moment she stops speaking and stumbles slightly, her mouth open in a way that would be considered comical were it not for the heartbreaking undertone.

The young doctor stares at the superhero for a moment before she turns towards her brother, “What’s going on?” her voice is monotone, completely devoid of life compared to how it sounded a couple of minutes ago.

Steve’s hands clench painfully at his side. A few days ago, he was chasing this woman around their apartment and now she won’t even look at him. He barely acknowledges Bucky’s hand on his shoulder in the form of support. His childhood friend has been giving him a sympathetic glance ever since he figured out about his feelings for Liz and frankly, he’s tired of it.

“We’re helping Rogers stop the Winter Soldiers, just like you wanted,” Tony tells his sister as a matter of fact, and it's during moments like these; when Tony’s voice would take on an authoritative form, that most people stop having difficulty picturing him as an older brother and not the other way around.

The two siblings share a look, somehow managing to have a whole conversation, and based on Liz’s obvious grumble and look of exasperation, Tony evidently wins the argument. Blowing a loose strand of hair off her face, she grumbles, “Fine, lead the way.”

The mechanical whirring of the Iron Man mask jolting itself into place is the only source of sound in the eerie bunker, and Steve doesn’t miss the pointed look the older Stark gives him, tilting his head towards Liz, who, despite her unbothered stance, is hiding a whole lot of hurt.

Before they can exit the entrance of the bunker, Steve grabs a hold of Liz’s hand, calling out her name softly.

She pulls back as if she’s been burnt, and Steve thinks he feels the same way when the woman he is madly in love with, cradles her hand as if he fractured it, biting out the words, “Don’t.”

Maybe Elizabeth Stark has kindness that is unparalleled across the galaxies. Maybe she’s the girl that forgives and forgives and never stops forgiving because forgiveness is all she’s got and maybe she’ll always care too much for a world that’ll never care enough. But the girl in the bunker inching away from Steve Rogers is too broken, too scarred to be Elizabeth Stark.

Steve Rogers was never deterred by her broken pieces and jagged scars and so he inches closer as she pulls away, “I'm sorry. I shouldn’t have promised.”

Liz notices, bitterly, that he doesn’t apologize for leaving, but for telling her that he wouldn’t, “Doesn’t change things.”

He shrugs, “Maybe not. But I don't know what’s behind those doors and I thought I should apologize and tell you that I've been planning on how I would tell you that I love you for months now.”

Her gaze snaps from where she was pointedly staring at the back of her brother's head to Steve’s blue eyes and sooty face with a broken smile and fractured stance and she wonders if this world might be kind enough to actually let her have this, let her have _him. _

She decides to try her luck.

“Maybe you should execute one of those plans when all this is over then?”

He knows she means more than what they’re walking into in this Siberian Bunker. He knows she means this whole mess with the Accords and Ross and the superheroes and fought alongside him in Germany.

Not for the first time with Elizabeth Stark, Steve Rogers allows himself to hope, “Maybe I should.”

She smiles at him and for the first time since this mess started, he believes that he’ll be okay.

Led by Iron Man, the four walk into the open dingy room. Liz doesn’t hide her obvious distaste as she looks at the caked walls, broken ceiling and shattered glass. Bucky just hides his smile. She is, inarguably, humble in all the ways that matter, but he can't help but be amused at Elizabeth’s Stark’s discomfort and unfamiliarity to the room she walks into, while for him, this is close to luxury. He’s had worse during these years in the run.

“I’ve got heat signatures,” The modified voice of the Iron Man suit startles Steve, but he keeps a lid on it. A lot is depending on him at the moment, and the last thing he needs to do is startle himself and startle Buck and cause another disaster before completely fixing this one. 

“How many?” He asks Tony, immediately after he regains his composure, unknown to anyone but Liz, who has to hide her smile.

Instead, she focuses on the readings displayed in front of her own screen, through her contact lenses and frowns in confusion at data, “One?”

Waving his gun around the room in paranoia, Bucky feels his eyebrows constricting. One doesn’t sound right. There should be a whole lot more than one. He’s fought so many, mourned for so many. 

The four walk into the room, completely alert, the only source of light coming from Tony Stark’s repulsor and Elizabeth Stark’s orbs of lightning. They each stare in different directions as the lights come on, bathing the room in an almost dirty yellow, and Liz recognizes the synchronized beeping; she hears it every single day.

“They’re dead,” She breathes out, barely a whisper, but the words echo and it reaches the ears of everyone in the room, not excluding the King of Wakanda.

Tony’s heart pounds once the automated voice comes back on, and he stares at his sister, who is also undoubtedly trying to locate the source of the terribly automated voice, “if it's any comfort, they died in their sleep.”

Tony can almost picture his sister’s look of angered disbelief at the prospect of that even remotely being enough to comfort her, but he determinedly runs scans again, Jarvis’ drive working non-stop. His sister takes a couple of steps towards the nearest Winter Soldier and he follows her, leaving Rogers and Barnes as they venture to the opposite side of the room, presumably looking at the same thing.

“Did you really think I wanted more of you?” Up close, the billionaires can see the single shot wound to the head and they realize, at the same time, that they’re both supposed to be here, that this was expected – wanted. 

The voice comes back on, the slight emotion in them confirming everyone’s thoughts; someone else is in here. “I'm grateful to them though. They brought you here.”

The lights shut dramatically, and the room is bathed in momentary darkness before everyone’s focus is directed towards the man behind the glass.

Steve isn’t in control of his fear and anger as much as he thinks he is. He swings his shield at the sturdy wall and, as expected, the circular disk comes flying back as if it were just a mere Frisbee instead of Wakanda’s vibranium.

“Please Captain; The Soviets built this chamber to withstand a launch blast of UR-100 rockets.” Zemo doesn’t seem the slightest bit unfazed and it starts to bug Tony.

“I’m betting I can beat that!” The engineer says, in a voice that barely controls his fear.

“Oh, I'm sure you could Mr. Stark, given time.”

Liz blows an angry breath, but it doesn’t help, and she retorts, “And I'm sure you’ll only be in a coma for the rest of your life if _I_ decide to blow up that wall.”

For the first time, Bucky sees a slight hesitance in Zemo’s face, and he thanks whomever the hell he’s supposed to thank that Tony Stark decided to bring himself and his sister to make amends.

He comes to regret the statement dearly when a single button is pressed and a television is turned on and lives are ruined.

Here’s the thing about war. No one ever really wins. There’s always a tipping point. The point where one stops and realizes that they’ve signed their soul to the devil and there is no coming back. There is nothing they can do to save themselves anymore. There is always one moment, one word, one action, one breath that changes everything.

That one moment that defines the beginning of loss.

Here’s the thing about war. You always lose.

Steve Rogers and Tony Stark found their tipping point in a single press of a button and in a single one-minute video.

Tony and Elizabeth Stark can be said to be one of the smartest people in any room. Both had grown up walking into classrooms filled with kids much older than themselves and had a countless amount of awards and trophies that neither bothered to frame. Regardless, neither recognized the odd letters on the ancient T.V screen but watched with avid curiosity as the black and white reel began to come to life.

Ever since he was old enough to understand, T’Challa was groomed into being the future King of Wakanda and was taught everything he needed to know, all the traits he would need to possess.

One of those traits was sensibility. Another was compassion. Both combined made a wonderful king. Since that wretched day in Vienna, T’Challa had managed to lose his compassion and his ability to see things straight. The only thing that was left was his thirst for vengeance and his anger; the two emotions that his father despised.

It's coming back to him now. The pain, grief, suffering. He’s finally feeling the inexplicable sorrow of losing a parent; of losing a part of your whole.

It’s coming back to him as he watches Tony and Elizabeth Stark look at their parents be brutally murdered and he will regret the decision he makes then, for the rest of his life; he will spend all of eternity wondering what would have changed suppose he planted his feet to the ground and stayed there to witness the aftermath, partake in the events after the life-changing video. Instead, he runs out of the central control room, out into the freezing cold, the events of the past few days finally reaching him and he does his own kind of breaking in front of the Siberian bunker, completely oblivious to all that had happened after he left.

The decision he will spend his entire life regretting.

`~*~`

She’s crying. She doesn’t know it. But Steve knows that he will have nightmares of Elizabeth Stark’s tears crawling down her face for the rest of his life. Tony’s face remains impassive, but judging by the painful clenching in his jaw, Steve knows he is anything but. He looks over to Bucky who is lost in his own nightmare and has the overwhelming need to run to his side and protect him. 

Someone once said that the future depends on what we do in the present. There are a thousand different ways the aftermath of the video could have played out; a million different choices each of the four individuals could have made, a plethora of things that could have been said, a countless amount of outcomes.

However, the tipping point that lost the so-called ‘civil war’ happened when Tony Stark, in his anger-filled haste made a movement to attack his parents’ killer and when Steve Rogers, in his haste to protect his friend once more, grabbed the red and gold suit, preventing him from moving any further.

Liz, stays frozen, staring at the black screen of the TV, tears streaming freely from her eyes, her posture stiff and cold, lifeless and dead, so very opposite of the woman herself.

“Tony, Tony,” Steve implores with his teammate, his voice taking on a note of desperation. He knows how this ends. He’s dreamt it every single night.

And that action, that single action, tips the scales in no one’s favour, because that one action, that one implore, gives away everything Steve has managed to hide for the better part of almost two years.

By some divine miracle, Liz manages to keep herself from exploding and destroying the entire country by looking at her brother, who has surely fallen over the edge and, unclenching her tightly woven jaw, hisses out at Steve, “You knew?”

She knows the answer before he says it, if his glassy eyes are any indication, but whatever sympathy she had for the man is long gone as her heart cracks through the middle when he says, “Yes.”

And then, the scales tip, even more, when Tony takes a giant step back, his anger building up to extremes, and with a powerful thrust of his repulsor, his metal hand makes contact with the Captain’s jaw, causing him to fall on the ground and stay there for a few moments.

Bucky has his gun drawn out and ready to shoot, but find himself unable to when he pulls the trigger, his hand turning mind-numbingly cold. He turns towards Liz, who was standing still and quiet in shock the entire time but now has the dangerous fire in her eyes, and a kind of ice in her heart Bucky has never seen before.

But some part of him, the part he not so affectionately calls the Winter Soldier comes back to life. Because while Bucky may be in control of all his emotions, and can remember every single thing that has happened to him ever since he was a child, he knows that this fuelling anger and sick satisfaction isn’t himself at all.

But the Winter Soldier has always been strong, he’s always managed to overtake Bucky Barnes and posses every inch of his mind until there was no trace of himself left in his own body. So while The Winter Soldier isn’t in control right now, the Hydra based killer most certainly influences him, especially when he hauls the large, heavy machine gun with incredible force at the woman and charges towards her brother.

Tony Stark puts up a fight, something he couldn’t have said back when they were fighting in Berlin. But the man can fight now, and as Bucky’s being held by the throat and whisked into the air, he can vaguely remember the Winter Soldier being impressed when he shot a gun at the billionaire, only to be met with resistance in the form of his glasses.

The impact of Tony Stark’s punch keeps Steve Rogers on the ground for a good chunk of time, before he manages to recover. He gets up off the ground just in time to see the metal leg of Iron Man pin Bucky to the ground, and before his best friend can receive a particularly hurtful punch, he is running towards the suit, ramming into him with such a powerful impact that it sends the metal man stumbling a few feet back. 

The movement allows Bucky to get back up, against his protesting muscles and he closes his metal hand into a fist, ready to punch the distracted genius. The Winter Soldier’s hard drive is programmed too deeply into his skull and he knows it. The thoughts and impulses that float through his brain are an indication of the fact.

But before he can strike the red and gold clad superhero, the familiar mind-numbing cold washes over him again and he turns to spot Elizabeth Stark, who removed herself from the fight for a few seconds to grab the video of her parents and trap it in an ice block for further use.

Charging towards her, he uses his iced hand to punch her, a punch she so easily dodges. She seems surprised at his level of functionality with a frozen hand, but she doesn’t understand that he’s been frozen since he fell off a train that fated day.

He fights in a way he has never done before, and she matches his every kick, punch and strike with her own. He’s never seen anyone fight like her, with so much emotion and skill, with so much power coursing through her veins, but the absence of it until it is absolutely necessary. She doesn’t fight methodically; there is no pattern to her moves. Her actions are as wild and as impulsive as she is, and it makes taking her on that much more difficult. In the background, he can hear Steve struggling with Tony and Buck headbutts his opponent, not allowing her to recover before sending a harsh blow to her stomach, a blow that causes her to go flying across the other side of the room.

He only learns what a terrible idea that was a moment later. 

See, here’s the thing about Tony Stark. He can think straight under the direst of circumstances, including when seeing his parents be brutally murdered by the very presence in the room; he just doesn’t because he’s angry and petty and so very betrayed. Still, he has a lid on his anger. He’s not blowing the entire place up into shambles and to him, that’s a win.

Hurting his sister means rationality flies through the window and doesn’t return for a long time.

So when he sees his sister go flying through the air in a not so graceful manner, it only takes a click of a button to send the large chrysalises to go crashing everywhere, Liz’s ice shield protecting her only for a moment before she sends the wall of ice towards her brother and focuses on Steve and Bucky.

The old Elizabeth Stark, the one who found her family in a dysfunctional team of superheroes and fell blissfully in love with Captain America would have put a stop to the whole fight and demanded reasonable thinking. This Elizabeth Stark, the one defined by broken promises, lies, and heartbreak, flings the chrysalises at Steve, water suddenly turning into raging fire for a better impact.

`~*~`

Here’s the thing about war. You never win. There is always a fight. Always a battle. A battle that never ends. It's messy, and bloody, and never worth it. The fight intertwines in a method where it is impossible to distinguish one side from the other; the enemy to the hero. It only lasts for an hour, maybe two, but it feels like days. Halfway into the fight, your bones are weary; you’re on the verge of collapsing but there’s that anger in you. The anger that makes you keep going, the angry that shuts down every thinking mechanism you have and pours all your attention into the war; into the fight.

Here’s the thing about war. You always lose.

The fight never stops.

Tony Stark and Steve Rogers didn't realize that as they fought in the wretched bunker in Siberia, throwing punches and drawing blood.

It's not a long battle. Between Afghanistan and the battle of New York and Sokovia, Tony has had worse. He’s used to the feeling of exhaustion, the pain from sharp wounds, and the throb in his skull.

He’s not used to this feeling of hurt. So much hurt. He’s not prepared for the great pang of guilt that overwhelms him every time he punches Steve Rogers; the man he learned to call a friend and partner, the man that his little sister loves to bits. 

Behind them plays another battle, between the Winter Solider and Liz. He’s trying to get to Steve to save him, and she’s trying to prevent the former Hydra Soldier from getting to her brother. After what she saw, she’ll be damned if Barnes goes anywhere near what’s left of her family.

He’s been fighting for decades and she’s been fighting since she was six, but her powers give her the advantage.

She can control them better now. She can now fight Bucky Barnes, hold him down on the ground, have a large blue electric rope break out of the ground, and wrap itself around the former Sergeant. She’s never been violent by nature; she’s sworn an oath to protect all life and so far, with an exception of a few aliens, she’s lived by that code.

But right now, at this moment, her morals, code and values fly out the window as she pins Barnes down, watching him struggle the way her mother did, the way her father fought for his life, fought for their life. He deprived her of her parents. He deprived her parents of the opportunity to see her and Tony grow, to watch their son save the world not only with his suits, but also with his mind. He singlehandedly destroyed her family and right now, she cannot see anything beyond that.

_It's only months later, after watching the video on the cassette 187 times, that she’s able to point out the subtle differences between the Winter Soldier and Bucky Barnes; human and Hydra. By that time, it's too late_.

The electricity crackles and she mentally calms herself so that the ropes won’t shock the man; because that is what he is, a man, and if Liz keeps reminding herself that, she’ll be fine.

But just as she mentally regains herself, she loses it, because the Captain, in an unsuccessful attempt at saving his friend while taking on Tony, throws his shield at Liz, the vibranium hitting her abdomen and sending her crashing into the ground. 

What was once two fights between four people then becomes one fight between four; the cracks that slowly break apart a team defined by trust, blood, and hardship becoming more prominent than ever.

However, there is always more to everything than what meets the eye. Steve Rogers maybe be violently protecting his friend, but he’ll be damned if one drop of blood leaves Elizabeth Stark’s body because of him. Tony Stark may be angry, but he has his repulsors and guns lowered to minimal damage, he’s not going to have more blood on his hands. Bucky is in the middle of his own mental battle between the person he is and the person Hydra engraved into his system. His movements are hesitant and scared and an exact representation of the inner turmoil in his head at the moment. And Liz, Liz, for the life of her, doesn’t have it in herself to hurt anyone, not the man she is still so in love with and certainly not the man who she, in some small part in the back of her head, knows is innocent in all this.

However, all of this changes when Steve gets angry. When Tony does too. When the anger turns its ugly head, and now, the punches are directed at each other, for the sole purpose of injuring and drawing blood. All of a sudden, Steve has Tony on the ground, pounding into his chest with his fists again and again.

He’s tired, he’s scared, and he’s angry. His sole purpose is to protect Bucky, but somewhere along the way, both their anger manifested into something impulsive and destructive; something regrettable.

Liz, who was half-heartedly trying to keep Bucky away from her brother, panics when she sees the Captain punching the life out of Tony. She’s fought Steve before; she knows how strong he is; how much damage he can inflict with just a single punch.

And in her panic, she forgets her powers. She completely disregards the sparking electricity that engulfs her figure and the red flame that dances in her irises; two things she cannot control.

Bucky, however, sees it and now, he’s the one panicking. He knows that Elizabeth Stark is in love with his best friend, but he also knows that she loves her brother more, and so when Liz rushes to her brother, her entire form covered in a multitude of colours, Bucky, in fear for Steve, jumps in the air and tackles her to the ground, keeping her there as Steve punches Tony. His metal arm constricts oddly, in an effort to pull her back as she thrashes wildly, uncaring of anything but the red and gold clad superhero who is all she has in this world. 

And then Steve, with no help from Tony’s goading and the muffled screams of pain from Bucky, snaps. The frustration and tension that has been building up ever since Nick Fury showed up in his apartment two years ago finally blows apart in the worst possible way.

Here’s the thing about war. You never win. Both teams, both armies, both sides, regardless of right or wrong, hero and villain; they all go with a blast. The fight ends explosively, not a single drop of peace present. The explosion breaks everything apart, kills so many people, ruins so many more, but no one cares. It never matters. Because at the end of the day, the explosion finishes the battle, finalizes the end, and everyone gets to go home.

But here’s the thing about war. No one ever wins. The explosion does nothing but destruct.

In this case, Elizabeth Maria Stark created an explosion that not only broke apart the Avengers, but also caught the attention of the entire galaxy.

It all happened in a matter of seconds; Steve Rogers, in his angered haze, lifts his vibranium shield into the air, positions it right above Tony who brings his hands up over his face in an attempt to save himself.

And Liz. She screams. Louder than ever before, her entire body wracking with fear, she screams.

And in six different locations, six different people, five different planets watch in awe as for the first time since the beginning of the universe, the Infinity Stones come alive.

Loki, whose dedicated small fragments of his day to make sure the Tesseract was still present, smirks knowingly when the blue cube levitates in the air before falling back after releasing a strong force field that knocks him and his kingdom out of their feet.

Vision screams in pain when he is lifted off the ground, the gem on his head shining brightly, and Pepper rushes to him, only to fall back due to the yellow force field, somehow able to hear Vision’s croak of a name.

Stephan Strange is forced to open the Eye of Agamotto as the Time Stone lifts itself into the air and sends a large wave of green, shattering the large window and knocking himself and Wong off their feet, before the Stone gently returns into the eye, and the world is still once more.

The collector runs into his treasure room, looking at the destruction the red barrier of energy caused, and finds that for the first time since it came to his possession, the liquid of the Aether is sizzling no longer, but is rather calm and delicate.

In Xander, the Nova Corps’ attempt to shield themselves from the blast of the purple energy is futile, and Irani Rael watches calmly, wondering if the stone will finally reach its master. When the purple gem stills and resumes its place in the orb, she supposes that today is not the day. 

In Vormir, the Red Skull watches in fear, as the soul stone presents itself for the first time since he’s been here, rising out of the ashes only to collapse back again with a great burst of power that tosses his liquefied form to the ground, and he knows, he knows, that the war is near. The war is imminent.

And it's a marvel to see. The six different powers, the six different colours, the six different entities zoom through the skies at a speed incomparable to anything before taking their place side by side, surrounding Elizabeth Stark and erupting into a large wave of pure energy that causes Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, Helmut Zemo, T’Challa and all of Siberia to crash into the ground, the entire region falling into darkness.

All in a matter of seconds. With a single scream from Elizabeth Stark.

Her lightning streaks.

She couldn’t care less.

She crawls over to her brother, who is knocked unconscious and checks for a pulse, breathing in relief when she can feel the steady patter of her brother’s heart.

It gives Steve enough time to summon the rest of whatever strength he has left to help Bucky up and hold onto him; the blast protected Liz and therefore protected the ones near her vicinity to some extent.

He walks away, before he can convince himself to stay. Before he can convince himself to give up rescuing Sam and the others, give up Bucky’s freedom, give up everything his team has fought for to hold Elizabeth Stark close and tell her that he loves her.

He should have known that he would lose her. The world was never kind enough to let him have something as pure as Elizabeth Stark.

Here’s the thing about war. It slowly picks your soul apart until there is nothing left of it. Here’s the thing about war.

You always lose.

You don't realize it. You may go home safe and sound with both arms and all ten toes. Your eyes might still be able to see and your ears can still hear. It's only after you wake up drenched in sweat at twelve a.m in the morning and flinch violently when your three years old daughter tackles you into a hug that you realize that you’ve lost.

The revelation may come anywhere. During a private dinner with your husband and you grip the glass so tightly it shatters. Taking a relaxing bath at home before you have the sudden urge to go under and never come back. Walking up the steps to church and being unable to breathe due to the onslaught of memories of the ones you called brother; the same ones who died bleeding in your arms. You realize you lost the war; anywhere, then everywhere.

Steve Rogers and Tony Stark realized it in a cold deserted Bunker in Siberia.

Elizabeth Stark realized it on a bright sunny day in an ugly conference room in the Avengers Tower, as a single document was being thrown in front of her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've tried my best to refrain from regurgitating scenes from the movie in this fic simply because I think it'd be boring if I wrote the same scenes over and over with the addition of my OC, but this scene was, in my opinion, the climacteric of the movie, which is why I had to pull lines and scenes word for word. sorry if it was a little dull.


	11. Chapter 11

**there’s a part of me that loves you more than i ever should  
there’s a part of me that loves you more than i ever could **

_23359:00:00 until War _

There is a part of him, a prominent piece of that puzzle that is himself, that screams _Anthony Stark _and_ Elizabeth Stark. _A large portion that wills him to protect and keep safe and yells _Sir _and _Ma’__am _in the jumble of messes that is his central system.

Vision likes to call that part Jarvis.

He found it rather jarring the first few days when he instinctively knew to turn the coffeemaker on at three in the morning because Tony Stark would need to replenish before he continued his all-night engineering. It unsettled him when he recognized Elizabeth Stark’s need for the lights to dim when she came home after a long surgery.

Eventually, he learned to coexist with the part of himself that cared for the Starks and learned to embrace the rooted need to protect them, to keep them safe. Tony and Elizabeth Stark were, in fact, his creators, and he’ll pretend that he doesn’t notice Elizabeth’s glassy eyes and Tony’s sad smile when he says something that vaguely resembles his predecessor, but he does.

He’s into the air and on his way to Siberia before the force field that he knows, from his very core, is Liz’s doing can completely return to the stone in his head and he saves that conversation away for later, allowing the part of him that he rather affectionately names Jarvis to take the forefront of his mind as he breaks speed barriers until he can catch sight of a moderately sized bunker in the middle of ice and snow.

She’s sitting there, in the middle of the catastrophic destruction so badly ruined that Vision cannot even glimpse what it used to be before it was a battlefield.

But she’s sitting there, calm and composed; hair a sooty mess, face scratched and wounds leaking blood through the thin cloth of what used to be blue. Vision doesn’t ask where the suit that blazed blue when she did went; he can see broken pieces of the metal scattered across the large expanse of shattered glass and bent metal and bloody handprints.

She looks at him when he walks in, eyes dry and dead and empty. She looks at him when he walks in and she stands up, legs jelly and stance heavy but she gets up and walks towards him, limping every two steps and pretending that the pain of moving isn’t taking too much away from her.

Her throat is raspy as she speaks, and it's soft and quiet and too hollow for a girl who uses expression as a second skin, who used to seep life into every word, every syllable, “He’s got multiple cracked ribs, and he’s been here for too long and it's too cold and there’s probably some internal bleeding and his arm—”

There’s a crack in her voice and a clench in her jaw and she heaves the life back down her throat before continuing, “—his arm wasn’t doing so well before so we need to get that checked out. Can you carry him back?”

Vision simply nods and he wonders if it should hurt an artificial being such as himself to treat Elizabeth Stark like a wounded animal who’ll collapse any moment when some days he had considered her strength personified, had believed that she was Atlas without aching arms.

“How about we take both of you on the jet?”

The stone on top his head pulses dangerously and every response in his form screams _protect _until the new voice emerges out of the shadows and reveals himself to be T’Challa, his suit on with the mask stored away as he approaches Vision and the Starks slowly. 

Liz keeps her eyes trained on Vision, locked so tightly as if she fears what she will find if she looks away. Perhaps it is for the best, Vision thinks; if she looks away, she’ll see her brother’s unmoving form lying on the hard ground of the bunker, the reactor dead, the blue that’s slowly starting to coat his lips.

“Elizabeth,”

The slight flicker in her stance is the only indication of her acknowledgement and she waits for him to continue.

“I need you to get Tony out of his suit.”

There’s a flicker of a spark, an unsteady flash of the girl she used to be when he says ‘Tony’. She gets on her knees at once, all unsteady and jarred and breaking – but it’s _movement_ – and Vision pretends not to hear her heave in a breath, then another before using her used up lungs, ignoring the sandpaper scratching down her throat.

“Friday, Open the Suit.”

The damage isn’t strenuous on Tony Stark, the cuts and wounds are new but not deep and the only cause of concern might be the odd angle at which his arm is turned. Vision wastes no time in stepping in front of Liz and it's only when he hears her broken sob of either protest or fear or loneliness or pain that he looks at the girl on the ground barely hanging on to the bloody thread labelled control.

T’Challa is there once more and Vision can hear the engines of the jet outside. T’Challa looks at him and nods, nonverbally telling Vision to take Tony away, telling Vision that he’ll bring Liz.

If it were any other circumstance besides the one that they are in now – with Tony Stark on the verge of hypothermia – Vision would have done nothing less than ensuring that Elizabeth stays beside her brother. Now, however, he slowly floats towards the jet, ignoring the man handcuffed to the pole and places Tony on the makeshift bed, watching in satisfaction as the heat slowly steals away the paleness in his face.

T’Challa brings in Liz shortly after. Her jaw is tightly clenched and death still steals from her eyes but her spine is straight with something temporarily adhesive and Vision wonders how long it will take for her to understand that it isn’t enough.

But temporary and not enough works for the moment because her voice lacks shattered glass and scratching sandpaper when she speaks, “Get Pepper on the line. She’ll have time to freak before we bring her boyfriend in and make sure Happy’s driving her in, he was supposed to be on a day off cause Tony and Pepper had a date night. I’ll call the hospital and arrange-”

“—I can do that.” T’Challa intercepts before the hysterical note to Liz’s voice can be apparent and she looks up at the man who’s never really left these past few days.

And she wants to argue, wants to tell him that the need for control is something she’s inherited from her father and her brother but she knows it’ll come out as a yawn because her bones ache and her lungs burn and she just so _exhausted. _

So she nods and doesn’t pretend that she can force a smile and instead looks away from the sympathetic looks and pitiful stares and confused questions and focuses on the rise and fall of her brother’s chest, the harsh but present puffs of air leaving his nose.

She’s asleep before the jet leaves Siberia, the kind of sleep that is induced by the ache in the bones and loss of blood in the veins. The kind of sleep that dangerously flirts between asleep and unconscious before landing resolutely on the side that forces T’Challa to carry her to the hospital room next to her brother and let her bloodied jumpsuit taint the pristine white of the bed while the very doctors that saved lives with her hook her up to machines and bags that monitor her heart and pump blood and water into her body.

She wakes up with sobs clogging her throat and tears streaming down her face and bunkers and her mother and shields tormenting her mind.

There’s a fresh pair of clothes laid out for her on the chair next to the bed and she carefully pries the wires connected to her body off before stripping herself of the hospital gown and pulling up the sweatpants and settling into the Harvard hoodie before walking through the doors and into the familiar setting of the hospital hallway.

The first nurse to spot her doesn’t reprimand her back into the bed but instead smiles with a kindness that Liz would return on a normal day and says, “Your brother’s in there. Woke up twenty minutes ago and demanded we give him something to play with. His words, not mine.”

Liz is handed a small tablet that is in a quite poor shape and she takes it graciously, trying for a smile in thanks but sure that it comes out pained and weak. The nurse doesn’t say anything, thankfully, and makes her way along the hallway, walking into the room two doors down from hers.

She’s sure she’s seen Tony doing worse before – he fell from a wormhole, was half dead with palladium poisoning him, was held captive for three months – so she doesn’t know what it is about this time that causes her to pause at the doorway of the hospital room; she suspects much has to do with the fact that aside from Vision, who reverently maintains his position in the chair beside Tony’s bed, Nick Fury is leaning against the north wall, unflinchingly still even as she walks in.

“Did you get in through the window or something?” She probably should have drunk some water before she attempted the challenge of forcing words up her throat; she doesn’t usually sound like someone is sucking the oxygen out of her.

If Fury recognizes her attempt in trying to pretend that this – _she – _is normal, which he probably does, he doesn’t comment on it, “Or something? If you must know. I walked in through the front doors.”

She siphons some sort of entertainment, some sort of happy at the mental image of Fury strutting into the hospital in all his black-coated, one-eyed glory and this time, the tip of her lips is small but genuine as she makes her way to her brother.

“Okay?” She asks him, tugging gently on the sleeves of his hospital gown.

They’re going to ignore the pungent smell of betrayal that wafts into the room and the bloody taste of Siberian bunker coating their mouths. They’re going to pretend that they cannot hear the air scream Steve Rogers and James Barnes and they’re going to pretend that it isn’t guilt and what-ifs that are trying to tug them apart.

They’re going to ignore and pretend and fake and so Tony smiles a smile that is all phony and camera and magazine and responds, “Few broken bones and a little bit of bleeding, nothing new.”

“Here’s what’s new,” Fury looks between the two of them with well-deserved disbelief, “The power surge that shut down all of Siberia and a little further not to mention the mess that’s the Tower.”

It’s progress. Liz considers it genuine progress when she doesn’t itch for the device that used to burn her nerves and shock her core and instead feels something that is part protectiveness, part pride and part guilt clawing through her veins where her impossibility resides as she slowly raises her hands, “That might have been me. No, that was definitely me.”

“Didn’t seem like your regular modus operandi.” Vision notes sitting up straighter in his seat. 

Liz shrugs indifferently, even though there’s a part of her that’s screaming out with brimming curiosity over the enigma that is her powers. She shoves that part away because thinking about her powers means thinking about Siberia and Steve and _god- _that’s that last thing she can do right now.

So she changes the topic, knowing that it’ll go unnoticed by no one, but hoping that they’ll have mercy and let it go for once, “Is that all?”

She’s got to give it to Fury; the man doesn’t hesitate for a moment before handing her the thick package that she didn’t notice until he picked it up from the floor. She stares at him for clarification and he gives it to her as he walks out the door,

“Read it. Sign it if you want. If you don’t, do me a favour and burn it to crisps with that fire of yours.”

She’s left in the room with Vision and Tony and the former makes his exit promptly, sliding through the wall and giving some poor nurse a heart attack. Tony makes space for her in the large expanse that is his bed and she slides in beside him wordlessly, the difficulty of trying to ignore all the things they’re trying to ignore increasing as their distractions leave the room.

Tony looks at her and his mouth tips up in a weak but genuine smile that tugs at something in her sternum, “Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, they will have to talk about the pungent smell of betrayal that wafts into the room and the bloody taste of Siberian bunker coating their mouths. They’re going to talk about the air that screams Steve Rogers and James Barnes and they’re going to talk about the guilt and what-ifs that are trying to tug them apart.

Tomorrow.

She tries for a smile back and is sure it comes out weaker than his but its genuine as she opens the flap of the sealed envelope with a thumbprint scan and pulls out a thick stack of papers neatly stuck together, “Today, we’ll figure this out.”

She should have known that Fury was going to bring nothing less than a hurricane into her life as she reads the big bold letters serving as the title of the very legal document that now resides in her hands.

_Reinstatement of the Strategic_ _Homeland Intervention Enforcement And Logistics Division _

“About damn time.” Tony murmurs from beside her, shifting slightly so that he can read the fine print better as she flips through the pages.

It was thorough; armed with signatures of several world leaders, contracts within contracts, several stamps of approval, indicating that the rebuilding of SHIELD has been in progress for far longer than she or anyone could fathom.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Liz says, more to herself than anyone, “why is he giving this to us right now? We shouldn’t know about the rebuilding until one of us goes snooping and finds out on our own. That’s how this works right?”

And if laughs were to hold words, Tony Stark’s would have said “_Of course,_”

Because he sees the words on the paper before his sister does and somehow, after all that has happened the past few days, he reckons that it is the only thing in the world that makes sense, “He’s not the one doing the rebuilding.”

His finger trail down the paper and stop right where the black ink stains the paper with the words _Director _and _Elizabeth Maria Stark. _There’s a blank line underneath, the only line that is yet to be signed and Tony can feel the world realign itself with rightness when he imagines Liz’s signature on the page.

“I can’t.”

It’s so much more than the fact that she’s emotionally unstable, already stretched too thin, or on the cusp of shattering completely. It's so much more than the fact that she already has a hospital to run, a Secretary of State to overthrow, 52 nations to appease.

SHIELD runs in her blood. Her father was SHIELD, her Aunt Peggy was SHIELD, Fury was SHIELD. Elizabeth Stark had the privilege of watching the absolute chaos and destruction that was SHIELD tear the people she loved apart, burn them inside out, torment them until their every cell retched of blood and weapons and distrust.

She’ll be damned if she lets SHIELD destroy her as well.

Tony, however, has other ideas, “You can. But you won’t.”

She nods, “I can. But I won’t.”

Her brother’s support has always been unwavering; always been present and constant but yet, she is surprised when Tony simply nods his head and says, “Okay.”

She raises an eyebrow, “That’s it. Okay?”

He shrugs, “What else do you want me to say? Okay. Don’t run SHIELD. God knows what happened to the others that tried.”

And like that, the conversation is over, even though Tony Stark packs it up and carefully stores for another day when Elizabeth Stark will inevitably walk through some doors and announce that she’s going to run SHIELD because she breathes fixing and righteousness and it won’t be too long before she’s going to grasp onto the opportunity to fractionally better the world.

Today though, she holds up the paper just as Vision re-enters the room to inform them that they’ll be able to leave the hospital, “Then I guess we better burn this.”

And she raises her hand in an action that she has learned to engrave into her bones, an instinctive, natural action that is as easy as breathing, as easy as imagining the tendrils of heat travelling through her system and releasing out of her person.

Only instead, she gets purple and large jolt of pain through her spine as the burst of violet power bounces off her fingertips and creates a large dent in the ceiling, Vision’s quick thinking creating a sort of super-shield that allows the debris to bounce away from where both Stark’s recline on the hospital bed.

“Where’d my fire go?”

It’s more of a rhetorical question than anything because not one person in the room; Tony who was awake in Siberia to see the multitude of colours that could not be described better than by a Norse God of Thunder who went into a pool of enlightenment, Vision who can feel the stone at the top of his head pulse dangerously, and Liz, who’s always known better than she’d admit.

Regardless, it’s Vision that smiles at her in a way that is far too affectionate for the handful of times that they’ve interacted, letting the part of himself that is all Jarvis and lives entirely for the Starks say,

“Perhaps the fire was never there. Perhaps it was the stones all along.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's been two months since my last update. Do I want to do better? Absolutely. Will I? Probably not. So sorry for the long wait, I hope everyone is still safe and healthy and well.


End file.
